Refine edge - photoshop

Tuesday's lesson concerned 'refine edge' in CS5 Photoshop. Basically its a tool for layering one image seamlessly onto a new background. Below is my first attempt. Not too bad I think. Some extra editing could be done on the strands of the hair at the sides as you can still see small areas of the original background. I took an image of a punk styled model with BIG hair and placed her onto an apocalyptic background...or is it the UK riots? Not sure. Anyway, I wanted to try something quite visually striking so went for fire and smoke.
After flattening the image I then used lightrooms editing settings and played around with the exposure and colour.
The following pictures show the different stages of the process.

Fig 2 Original model image

Fig 3 Layered on top of background and refine edge used around the hair

Fig 4 Final edit in lighroom with grunge effect

Lightroom Slideshow

Here is my first attempt at creating a slideshow using Adobe Lightroom. The pictures were taken the day after bonfire night (hence the smoke) around my hometown of Hebden Bridge. I took some images underneath the railway bridge as test shots prior to shooting my book cover there. I played around in lightroom and used a pre-setting of 'colour creative - aged photo'.