How do you fix skin discolourations?

[CrystalH]

I've just started getting my maternity, baby and family portrait photography business going and I've been having some difficulties with PP. I thought I was pretty good with Photoshop till now!

My main problems are with babies skin. Things like baby acne, rashes, or the yellow and red patchy skin some babes have. I'm pretty good with the Clone tool, but in situations like these, where there isn't much good skin to go by, I've been having trouble. What do you guys do? Do you have a way to soften the skin? Should I be looking for a Photoshop action? I'm currently using CS3 and am hoping to upgrade to CS4 shortly (or maybe I'll go with Lightroom 2, if I can figure Lightroom out).

[roxifoto]

This is what I do:

1. Duplicate the layer and use the healing brush tool to fix any pimples or obvious spots.
2. Set the blending mode to Overlay
3. Invert the image
4. Filter > Other > High Pass. Turn it up until all the flaws are gone - you may over exaggerate here because you can turn down the opacity later
5. Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Turn it up or down until you can just see the High Pass filter. This value is usually a 1 or around there - it can be lower.
6. Apply a quick layer mask by clicking ctrl + layer mask or option + layer mask on a mac
7. Use a white brush and paint over the parts where you want the skin to be smooth. Avoid areas like the eyes, nostrils, defining facial features etc.
8. Turn down the opacity until the face still looks natural but the skin is smooth.

I cannot take credit for this as I found this in a tutorial somewhere but cannot for the life of me figure out where.
Hope that helps!