I have been working with my Dicken's Fair photos to get even mor eout of them, and come up with some useful tricks. Her face was well-lit by flash, but everything else was dark.

1) I duplicated the layer.
2) I erased the skin in the top layer.
3) I did a select color, shadows, then feather 5 pixels, then copy, then paste on the top layer.
4) I set the blend mode to screen, and adjusted layer opacity to taste, then combined the two top layers.
5) This left the top layer washed out, so I radically increased the saturation.
6) Finally, I adjusted the bottom layer for a good face tone using color balance, since nothing else was visible from that layer, and used the healing brush to get rid of facial blemishes, and the clone stamp to correct some flash reflections in her gums.
7) As this was shot with an ISO of 800, there was some noise, so I used the blur tool at 50% opacity to smooth out the skin.
8) I finally flatened the entire image.

I feel like it took it from something only she would appreciate to a decent image.