How to make my photos look really good with Gimp?

How can I make this picture look glitz?

• I am messing around with my brothers picture and I was just trying to make it look like the glitzier photos from pageants because i thought i might want to test it out on my sisters photos. Here is his original photo: http://tinypic.com/r/123p35x/5 And here is the one I did: http://tinypic.com/r/29ngml0/5 I use photoshop, picnik, and gimp.

• Answer:

  Here's my retouch http://i.imgur.com/MpQik.jpg just using GIMP. First of all I ran unsharp mask to boost the local contrast (radius 50, amount 0.25) then selected the skin, copied it to a new layer, and blurred it using gaussian blur. I copied and pasted the irises of the eyes to a new layer, applied curves to brighten and unsharp mask to sharpen them, overlaid the irises with another layer and some colour to intensify the blue, setting the layer mode to colour, and toning it down by reducing the layer opacity. Lightened the white of the eyes with the dodge tool. Similarly with the lips, to a new layer, increased the saturation. Created a new layer (Layer from Visible), then duplicated that layer. I then blurred out the background, using the paths tool to create a selection which I turned into a layer mask to separate the image from the background to which I added gaussian blur, I fixed the blurring around the image by using the clone tool on the background layer, then merged everything down, duplicated the layer, added the Graphic Boost effect from the G'MIC plugin, then toned down the effect by reducing the layer opacity to about 10%. Merged down again. Finally added another slight sharpening using unsharp mask, It's a very nice photo by the way, even just as it is, without any retouching.