Selective Color work here? -- Fire Poi

I was playing with this photo for a while deciding what to do with it -- I thought it looked great straight OOC, but I still felt it could use a bit more. Ended up going with this:

I like the photo a lot, but I feel like if you put the person in black and white and then the fire in color it makes the fire look like it was just added in Post Processing instead of photographed that way. I think the idea of it is really neat though! And the end result still looks good either way... that's what's important!

You could also make the fire gradually go from back and white (from where it begins) into color... just an idea, though!

Nice shot. And the - often abused - selective colouring works here.

Hmm, thanks for the critiques. I have no idea how to make the fire gradually fade -- not that good with photo shop, haha.

Really awesome image, but personally i dont think selective color works anywhere.

Since you have the skillz and patience to do selective coloring, I would like to see the American Eagle letters and logo on elasticated waistband cloned out.

Composition is nice.

To make it fade, use a soft brush (hardness set to zero and paint from color to bw or erase from bw to color).

I'm not a fan of selective color. This is a pretty good example of that technique being not too bad. Good composition. I've tried to shoot this, never get this good of a result. Nice job shooting.