You’ll soon be up to your eyeballs in photos taken over the holiday season -- and not all of them are likely to be worth sharing with family and friends. While there are many options for enhancing photos, the original is still one of the best: Adobe Photoshop. So without further ado, here’s a look at five ways to beautify those digital images before you hand them out to loved ones.

Fix ‘Em Up First

Before you start dressing up holiday photos, you should first make them presentable with a few traditional techniques. It’s often best to work on a copy of your file, so after opening an image, use Image > Duplicate then File > Save As and start editing. If you plan to print images in a standard size such as 4x6 inches, use the Crop tool to cut out unwanted portions of the image right out of the gate. You’ll want to use “6 in” for width, “4 in” for height and for print go with 300 dpi, regardless of original image resolution.

For most images, you can achieve a good color and exposure automatically by selecting Image > Auto Color; if you don’t like Photoshop’s auto color balance, use Edit > Undo, then try Image > Auto Contrast for an exposure change without tweaking the overall color. For more control, select Edit > Adjustments > Levels (or Command-L), where you can click Auto to have Photoshop give it a try or use the sliders to adjust the input levels. Move the left slider toward the right for more contrast; the middle slider will adjust overall brightness in either direction.

Red eyes are frequently the bane of flash photography, but thankfully, you can eradicate them with ease in recent versions of Photoshop. Press the J key to select the touch-up tools, then Control-click to select Red Eye Tool. Adjust the Pupil Size and Darken Amount if necessary, then click on those offending red eyes -- one at a time -- to watch them go bye-bye.

Finally, beautify subjects with the Spot Healing Brush. Press the J key again, then Control-click to select Spot Healing Brush Tool. Adjust the brush size accordingly and start clicking on areas with dust, skin blemishes or other unwanted defects to remove them like magic.

Selective Color

One of the most popular ways to spruce up almost any photo these days is through the use of selective color -- basically, desaturating everything in an image except for one or two things you want viewers to focus on. This technique works great with holiday photos that use Christmas ornaments, Santa hats and other familiar seasonal props.

After choosing a subject, press the W key, then Control-click and choose the Quick Select Tool (assuming it isn’t already selected). Choose the area where you want to retain color.

Now, right-click the selection and select “Layer via Copy,” which creates a new layer containing your subject which has been separated from the rest of the image.

Finally, select the original background layer and choose Image > Adjustments > Desaturate, which makes everything except the separated layer black and white. If you’d like more than one area to remain color, simply undo and copy those areas to new layers the same way, then desaturate the background image once again. When finished, use Layer > Flatten Image to merge the layer(s) into the background and save as a new file.

Add Snowflakes to Images

Nothing makes a holiday photo festive like adding a little favor of the season -- in this case, snowflakes!

To create your own, use File > New to create a new document and make sure Background Contents is set to White. The width, height and resolution are dependent upon the image you plan to paste the snowflakes onto, but two or three hundred pixels at 72 dpi should be fine for most uses.

Next, press Shift+U to switch to the Rectangle tool, click and hold, then select Custom Shape Tool from the contextual menu that pops up. Control-click anywhere to bring up the Shape picker, click on the small triangle in the upper left corner and select Nature; click OK when asked if you want to replace or append the current shapes.

Scroll through the Nature shapes until you find the snowflake; there will be three different shapes together in the same row. Select the first one, “Snowflake 1,” and hit Return on the keyboard.

Now click on the Fill Pixels icon in the Options bar, which will allow us to use the snowflake shape as a brush.

Press the D key to reset Photoshop’s Foreground and Background color to default settings, which makes Foreground black. This is required for making our snowflake into a brush. Click in the center of your document window, drag outward and hold down the Shift-Option keys as you do -- you’ll need to drag first before using these keys, otherwise you’ll switch to the Eyedropper tool by accident. The Shift key will constrain your snowflake to the proper aspect ratio, while the Option key expands it from the shape from its center.

Once you’ve filled the frame with a snowflake, release the mouse button and then the keys. Trim excess white background from around the snowflake using the Crop Tool. Select Edit > Define Brush Preset and name your first snowflake something appropriate. Click OK and you can discard the document without saving. Now repeat this process for the other two shapes so you’ll have three different snowflakes to work with.

Open the image you want to decorate with snowflakes, select the one of the new brushes you’ve made (Shift+B), adjust to appropriate size, change the Foreground color to a nice, frosty white and use the brush as a stamp, adding snowflakes wherever they’ll spice up your photo. For variety, change the transparency and size of some snowflakes or even rotate them to give the illusion of depth and motion.

Spice Up Image Backgrounds

They say variety is the spice of life, and holiday photos are no exception. If you’d like to spice up a holiday family photo or simply remove an undesirable background from an otherwise decent image, Photoshop is happy to oblige.

First, you’ll want to select a new background to add to the existing image. Since we’re doing this strictly for personal use, this can be from just about anywhere -- a Google Image Search can usually turn up plenty of choices by simply typing in a few keywords for what you seek. (If you plan to print your final image, you’ll want to consider royalty-free stock photos instead.) Be sure to click “Large” under Any Size at left so you’ll be selecting only images that will match the resolution of your original photo (or close to it, anyway).

When you find one you like, download it by using Control-click in Safari 5 and selecting “Save Image As.” Give it a distinctive name and click OK.

Next, load up your original photo in Photoshop. Select Layer > New > Background from Layer and click OK (you can optionally name the layer first if you’d like), which allows you to select certain areas we want to keep and remove the rest, leaving a transparent background where we can insert our stock photo. There are many ways to make this selection in Photoshop, but we’ll use press the W key and use the Quick Select Tool.

With a decent-sized brush of 50 to 100 pixels (depending upon the area you're selecting), begin drawing inside the areas you want to keep -- likely the image of you and your family, in this case. Depending on the background, you may need to hold down the Option key while making a quick selection to remove any areas that the application has selected by mistake. Once your subject(s) are surrounded by the “marching ants” of the Quick Select Tool, you can choose Select > Refine Edge to adjust the edges of the selection using smooth, feather, contrast and other options as necessary.

When you’re happy with the selection, choose Select > Inverse and press the Delete key. Now, the existing background will be removed, leaving only the subject(s) you have selected. Choose File > Place, browse for your new background image and resize accordingly (hold the Shift key to retain proper aspect ratio), then press Return to commit the change. Finally, you’ll need to move the new background layer below the original in order to see your subjects laid out against the new one. To keep the layered image, save as a PSD file; otherwise, choose Layer > Flatten Image to flatten the file and save in whatever format you’d like.

Give Christmas Lights An Extra Glow

Low-wattage Christmas lights can often make for tricky photography when taken in a brightly lit room. If you prefer to give them some extra zing, Photoshop comes to the rescue with the Outer Glow selection.

Before you get started, finish up any other adjustments you want to make to the image, such as color saturation or overall exposure levels. Once you’ve got it looking the way you’d like, select the Lasso tool (Shift+L) and start encircling all of the Christmas lights that have the same color (hold down the Shift key for multiple selections). Don’t worry about steady hands and making an exact selection, as long as the lights are lasso’ed, you’ll be fine.

With all the lights of a single color selected, go to Select > Modify > Feather and enter a reasonably low number: two or three for lower resolution photos, five or six for higher megapixel images. Now copy the lights to a new layer by selecting Command-J.

With the new layer selected, select Layer > Layer Style > Outer Glow from the menu.

From the Layer Style window, click on the color box in the Structure section as shown here and change it to something similar to the color of your selected Christmas light -- yellow for yellow, green for green, red for red and so on. You can get a good match by choosing the eyedropper from the color picker and clicking on one of the lights to sample that color, then click OK to commit to it.

Finally, adjust the Spread and Size options under Elements in the Layer Style window until you’re happy with the amount of extra glow surrounding your Christmas light. Make sure Preview is checked so you can see the changes as you make them. Click OK, return to the original Background layer and repeat for the next color and soon you’ll have the brightest bulbs in all of town. When finished, flatten the layers (Layer > Flatten Image) and save.

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