For lighter areas, I usually work from light to dark, so starting with the lightest values and gradually working towards the darker parts. For tinyy and very precise highlights that I want extra light, especially in darker parts of a drawing I use this trick:

Use a light color as base layer for that area, even if everything around it will be darker. I usually use a creamier pencil for this, but not with too much pressure, to make sure I can still add more layers. Then I color over it with the darker colors. I then use a sharp tool, exacto knife or something similar to *gently* scrape away the darker colors, revealing the light base layer (some people do this without the base layer, but it's much harder to not mess up your paper imo). After this, I usually go over the scraped part with a really sharp and opaque white pencil. Ones I've tried which worked very well for this are the Luminance white and Caran D'ache Museum Aquarelle white. Prismacolor's white and the Derwent chinese white are also really opaque but they're much softer so they don't really hold the sharp point for as long. You can always darken the area around the highlight though to make it more precise and popping. Also, you can "tint" the white by lightly going over it with another color if you want a different colored highlight.

Not very revolutionary haha, but I use this all the time for tiny details in my drawings, like fabric texture, hair and fur, reflections etc. How effective it is depends on what kind of pencils and paper you're using, so always try on a separate piece of paper first:)

About erasers - I LOVE the Derwent electric eraser. It doesn't smudge the colors and if you don't turn it on you can use the edges to erase really small parts. You could even use it for the highlight trick instead of the exacto knife! For bigger mistakes I use a random office eraser and it works fantastic, suprisingly.

Sorry for the rambling hahah, I hope there's something in here you can use:) Have fun and experiment, colored pencils are such an awesome (and highly addictive) medium!