wondering if anyone has found a good workaround to avoid the dark smudges you get when using healing brush on say light skin near dark hair? i always expected adobe to add a feature that would allow you to limit the tones you wanted healing brush to consider but that never happened.

i usually end up using clone on 10-15% and slowing retouching that way, but i was curious if anyone has found a better way?

The RAW editor in Photoshop has much more control over these types of issues.  See the link below for a demonstration.  Cheers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jq60-mpNZzM

Use clone stamp, or lasso off the area you're cloning into. Anything outside the selected area won't be affected. It also helps to zoom in very closely to make sure your changes don't bleed into unwanted areas.

I always use the clone tool, (or the healing brush, less often), on a separate layer, so I can adjust the brightness, erase, or anything else I see is needed to integrate the (small) area with the rest of the image. Another technique is to use a very small, soft edged paintbrush, on a separate layer, sampling from surrounding areas to get the desired color(s). The problem with this technique is that one usually doesn't have the experience with painting to do a really great job of it.
-Don
EDIT: I agree with the guy above, zoom WAY in, (200% or so, depending on the resolution of the image), so you can really see what you are doing.