Workshop: Editing portraits: Pictorialist edition

Despite paying for Adobe CC for several years, I've deliberately avoided using Photoshop for a few reasons, chief amongst them being it looks incredibly complicated and I would need to factor a great deal of time into my life to teach myself how to use it properly, which wasn't going to happen. It had zero priority in my life. None. I was happy to focus on Lightroom.

Now I have to learn Photoshop and quickly. So when I had a presentation on how to edit portraits to recreate Pictorialism, I was a teensy bit worried.

I've attempted to follow these instructions now several times over several days and it seems to me that there might be something missing, as a I'm simply not getting the results that are shown in the handout. I think some of this may be attributed to the tutorial assuming that the user (me) will have a basic level of prior knowledge about Photoshop, given that there's a jargon type reference in there that I don't understand (what is a "mod"?), but as I said, I know nothing about Photoshop.

I don't have an edited portrait in this style and I don't know what the outcome of this will be, but I have learnt to use the spot healing tool. Not my best work but it's still progress and isn't that what counts?

Before

After

I'll chalk this up to Photoshop: 1. Michelle 0.

For now.