Glad that you like my photos!
Brian is right about what he said. You also need to have a plan with your photo, how you want the end result to look. The lighting is very important to achieve to look I'm going for. I usually light with one light in front of the subject, pointing down at an angle. And then I have two rim lights at around 45 degrees behind the subject on each side. I'm also shooting in raw format to get the highest quality possible. Also trying to work with an aperture around 7.1-8.0, I think my lens is sharpest around that area.
Also, I'm using a Canon 7D with the Canon 50mm f1.8 lens and hotshoe flashes. I've chosen hotshoe flashes to be able to shoot anywhere and be able to carry all my gear by myself and because they are affordable.
What I first do in Photoshop is to clean up the skin a bit, getting rid of spots, zits, bruises etc. Then I smoothen the skin a bit. There's many ways to do this, google it and see what fits you the most. I've techniques from different skin smoothing techniques and making my own way of doing it. After the smoothing is done, I bring out the detail in the image. You can do this by using the high pass filter, although I use another method that works better for me. After that I do some dodging and burning, this changes the image the most and is the most fun part of the retouching, I think. To make the eyes pop a little I use the "Selective Color" adjustment layer, make the mask black, set the blending mode to "Linear Dodge (Add)" and then mask out the iris of the eye. Then you need to lower the opacity quite a bit. After that there's some color correction and hue/saturation layers. I also do some other minor stuff to get everything right. And of course, you need to sharpen the image, and I do that with the "Unsharp Mask" in Photoshop.
I'm not the greatest photographer or retoucher, I've only been photographing for 1,5 years, before that I hadn't even thought of being a photographer or buying a camera. So I'm still learning and trying new techniques for everything. And when I first started out I only wanted to do sport photography. It was only a couple of months ago I started taking portraits and began to experiment with retouching in photoshop. I do enjoy taking photographs but the postprocessing in photoshop is, without a doubt, the most fun part for me.
I hope this helps a little.