Giving the studio look

I was editing a photo last night. When I edit, I usually know what I want to do with the photo. However, this particular one, I initially felt was destined for the dump.

See how its underexposed and quite noisy ? Thats the first thing I saw too. Then however, I noticed the light shining at the top of her head on her headband which got the tiny little wheels churning inside my brain. I thought this would be a great "studio" image. Except I didn't have strobes or flashes or set her up against a white background when I took it. So I decided to give it about 5 minutes of tweaking time to salvage it. I decided to try a technique I'd read a few months ago to use levels to blow out the background since it was mostly all off-white and since her clothes didn't have the offwhite color in them. All that I was left with were tiny bluish spots in the back where the green was, which I very easily painted over. Once the background was taken care of, the rest was easy. Here's the final product.