The color's death warmed-over, but these curves...

...provide a nicely bronzed tone to the skin.

And the addition of a pleasant facial glow (also covered in Part III) completes the effect.

For all the convoluted explanation, the actual procedure takes about 15 minutes.

The variations are infinite. Depending on the opacities of the various layers you can create a crisply focused look or a soft fuzzy look. If the underlying image is fairly well retouched, the entire set of smoothing layers can be reduced in opacity to blend back into the original. Another approach would be to cluster the High-Pass settings towards the smaller end, rather than spacing them out evenly over the full range.

They all add up to the same thing: bluring the big chuncks out of existence, keeping the small bits and making them the focus.

Discuss this technique on Dgrin, here.