Digital photography is great because it allows the normal, every day user to have power over how their photos come out. Unfortunately, most of the time I don’t spend much time ‘developing’ my photos, and kind of just keep them raw.
Now I’ve used Photoshop for a long time — I think the first version I used on a Mac was 3.0 — but I’m far from an expert. I just have a collection of little tricks I know that have come in handy from time-to-time. I’m only recently getting to the point where I can pull those tricks together for a particular project.

This is one of the tricks I learned somewhere on the web that, when used on photos, can quickly improve the result. Here’s an example:

Before. A picture taken on a Kodak Z740, at 4 megapixels, in decent light with the flash on:

After. A couple quick steps applied to it in Photoshop:

My son has incredible eyes, but their color sort of gets washed out on my camera. Also the background grabs more attention that it should. The dresser he’s fishing around in was a Craigslist purchase intended to hold us over for a couple years, so its not terribly attractive.
The “after” picture helps correct these problems by bringing out the color, but reducing the severity of the other imperfections. I’m sure there’s more you could do, but this is quick and easy. Here’s how I do it:

• Open the original photo in Photoshop. If you can’t do that, this is probably the wrong tutorial for you!
• In your Layers on the right, duplicate the photo layer…
  
• On the newly created, top-most layer, choose Blur > Gaussian Blur from the Filters menu…
  
• I usually use a Blur of around 5-6. This will look weird, but don’t worry…
  
• Double click on the new, blurry layer (still the top-most) and change the Blending Mode to Overlay
• Now drag the Opacity slider until your image looks good. Usually between 40-60% looks right to me, but it will depend on the image…
  
• Bonus step: Select the eyes, and copy and paste them into their own layer, between the original and the new blurry layer. Set the Blending Mode of the eye-ball layer to Overlay as well to really bring them out even further
• Save the completed image!

I still consider myself a Photoshop newb, despite having used it for nearly 10 years, so if anyone else knows any other quick/simple tips for bringing out photos, I’d love to hear them!

Update: I just realised that Dooce has almost the exact same tutorial here. Hers is slightly different than mine and you end up with a darker background, but you could pick which Blend Mode to apply on a per-image basis.