How do you manage to get that realistic tone/bright on the skin?

My pictures usually look plain, and I tend to use a Windlight setting similar to yours.

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I'm not sure what single thing there is but some of it is the skin itself - our D-skins have wonderful highlights and shading on them. Apart from that I take them in Ultra setting at 3x my screen resolution, I had rezzed a glowing cube behind the camera for some additional light, I had adjusted the "east-angle" and tried nearly all my windlight presets.

Come to think of it - the one I used here is one I don't think you have as I normally only use it indoors because the sky looks black and boring. The water and our skin looked great though so I gave up on the sky and replaced it :)

But I also do a lot of liquifying and smudging and blurring and after that I adjust curves and levels and saturations and vibrancy until I get something I like. Sometimes doing things like making a copy of the layer, blurring it and changing the blending mode to "softlight" and reducing the transparancy can have a nice effect (and sometimes not).

I also often dodge and burn by painting in black and white on a separate layer set to "overlay" blending mode.

Unfortunately I don't have a set procedure that I can give you, I just keep changing things until I like how it feels and sometimes that takes a long time. I wish I was faster.

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and in my desperation and frustration with that picture I think I even tried some diffuse glow and then reduced the transparancy way down.

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Mmm... I usually play with curves and levels, but never tried vibrancy; in fact since my Photoshop is in spanish I have no idea where is it that option, could you give me the route? (like in Image-Mode-Levels).

I just tried liquify and is great! And yes, combining a partially gaussed layer under a soft light one is also great, thank you.

Now I will give a try at the dodge and burn :-)

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Vibrancy is a new adjustment layer in CS4

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