When shooting a portrait, a good rule of thumb is to focus on the eye closest to the camera. Another thing you want to look for when taking a portrait are catchlights in the eyes (those reflections of light in the eye), also try to not get shadows that are falling directly under the eye. Lack of catchlights and the undereye shadows result in "dead eyes".
Now for post processing, open your photo in the editor you use. I'm using Photoshop Elements.
The first thing I do is sharpen the facial features, I do the eyes and the lips generally. This can save a photo that's just a bit out of focus as well.
Duplicate the background layer and put a high pass filter on (filters>other>high pass). High pass filter at 10 seems to get me where I want most of the time.
Now change that layer's blend mode to hard light, and put a layer mask on the layer and fill the mask with black. Your photo now looks exactly like it did when you started.
If you hold down alt and shift while clicking the layer mask everything that is masked will turn red. This is handy to use when you're masking smaller details.
Use a soft white brush with white as the foreground color and paint over the eyes, catching some of the eyelashes and other facial features you want to bring out.
That looks a little creepy!
(alt +shift +clicking the layer mask will toggle the red overlay on and off).
Adjust the opacity of the layer and flatten.
The next step will brighten the iris just a bit.
Create a new blank layer (shift+ctl+n). Use a soft white brush and paint on the side opposite the catchlight.
Put a gaussian blur filter on that layer. Use a radius that just softens the white, but doesn't make it bleed into the iris or the pupil.
Then change the blend mode to soft light and reduce the opacity until it doesn't look fake, just adds a bit of brightness to the eye.
And you're done!
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