I usually do smudged hair, but I want to be able to do painted. This is what my hair usually looks like:

How do I make it look better??

Also, any tips to improve on the actual art itself? I had to do a color change from dark bay to blue roan fewspot...

I will say the color change is pretty good. Personally I paint my own hair almost Everytime I do photomanips especially the tail. I can PM you if your interested but I would say just tone down the smudge tool by about 10% and make the brush a lot smaller of that's what your looking for and just go with the flow of the hair instead of horizontal or zigzag it will make it look bad. Hope this helps also make sure that if the horse is in a foggy area it okay to soft erase the feet up to the height of the fog to ground the horse and don't forget that if the background is dark like this one sorta is to match the darkness on the horse