Been doing some reading

So I've been trying to do some reading up for Mondays presentations on retouching, and airbrushing. I've been using this book called The Adobe Photoshop cs3 book for Digital Photographers and another one called Photoshop Artistryfor Photographers Using Photoshop cs2 and Beyond. The second book doesn't really go into much depth on how to air bush it more or less. The first book though has a step by step guide to how to airbrush. The problem with this technique is that in the finish product the peoples faces looks washed out and/or like almost a gray tone to them. So i'm going to have to figure out away around this. I think I have traced the problem to the gaussian blur layer that they say to use as the base of the problem that I am running into. So I'm going to try and find away around this problem.