David,
I will offer up some of my thoughts, since I am doing some of this now. I do the conversion also, but keep sharpening and noise reduction turned off. It then depends upon what workflow path I plan to take. If just doing quick touch-ups, I will spend a bit more time on the RAW conversion getting things tweaked a bit more. First is always WB, followed by exposure, black point and and any highlight recovery needed. Then I shift to curves in the ACR module to boost contrast, or reduce it a bit in the lows, mids and highs, depending on the target look I am shooting for. If you do not have those adjustments in your RAW conversion, you will wind up doing them in PS, which is fine, but my mantra is to get as much adjustment made in RAW as possible. Then it is a bit of a dance between saturation and brightness, just nudging each a bit for balance.
Once pulled into PS, I usually either a "RAW sharpening" with tools like Nik Sharpener Pro or PhotoKit Sharpener. Not severe, but enough to define key edges. If it needs it, I will run a light pass of noise reduction, gently, and mainly to pull out any shadow and background noise, but not to change the skin, nor destroy details in eye lashes. I am using Nik Software Dfine 2.0 right now, and like it a bit more than Noise Ninja, though both are good, once you learn the controls and use brushes or regional applications over entire image applications.
From there, it all about removing spots and gently lightening areas around the eyes if they have deeper tones. Also a good time to gently lighten lines and creases. You do not want to pull everything out as that takes away character, but it nice to just lighten the deeper lines with a very small brush tip and the Dodge tool set at about 15% opacity. I then create a layer that imparts a skin softing look, very much like a Softar filter. I create a mask for that layer and "erase" the areas around the eyes, lips, hair and any jewelry or important things, blending the edges a bit. I come back and do a localized contrast adjustment around the eyes, eyebrows, lips, and jewelry to increase contrast and tone a bit.
The last step is to apply any sharpening, and to mainly do that around eyes, lips, hair and jewelry, with a bit more aggressive approach, and done on a layer so that it can be brushed on only where you want it to go, and also to control the opacity of that layer.
It sounds like a lot of work, and at first it is, but the results can be quite dramatic. It creates lots of pop and sparkle and life in the eyes and important facial features, while letting other stay softer and drop away more. This is mostly for women, as men tend to look better with a bit more contrast, no skin adjustment except blemish removal, and about a half stop underexposure also. Just my tastes, but the objective is to always have the eyes pull you into the image, unless the subject is looking away.
Just some ideas to start thinking about. My workflow may be more involved, but then I want my clients to buy several prints, not just one ;-)
LJ