Editing my photos

When I done the photoshoot I did not have access to a large clean black backdrop so i knew that i would have to use photoshop to edit any imperfections out of the background.
The image that I started with, for my front cover, looked like this:

In this picture there are quite a few white marks and smudges across the background that would make my image look messy.
On photoshop I used the smudge tool to help clear the white marks and this was the result:

This image has a much neater background and there are no white marks.