First real attempt at tweaking - suggestions, please?

Looking for critique and advice, please.

These are before- and after-tweaking pictures of my daughter. We have shots of her with this window from our reunion two and four years ago, too: they were shot with P&S cameras, and Rachel is pretty much non-identifiable in them. This one was taken with my 10D using the built-in flash for fill (we were running too short on time for me to get my 380EX out of the trunk), through my 28-105. She's slightly out of focus - I apparently didn't refocus well enough on her after setting the exposure on the wall to the right of the shot. The window is nice and crisp, though! (sigh) It was taken at ISO800 (so there's a bit of noise in the original, too), large JPEG; I'd just been using the camera for candid shots of our family reunion under fluorescents in the parish hall, and didn't reset anything.

I cropped the original (cropped version on the left below), ran it through Noise Ninja (what a great tool!), adjusted the fill flash to level 15, and color-corrected it (using her white collar as "white"), all in Photoshop Elements 2.0. Does anyone have any other suggestions for doing a better job of post-processing? I was pretty danged pleased with the results, considering the original. In other words, I know the photographic technique was lacking, is there something else you can recommend I do in post-processing to improve the final product?

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A good start. You are headed in the right direction.

The problem is that you have not yet found the Goldilocks exposure. What I did here was that I blended your two shots using THIS protocol. Then I opened the new image in PSE2 and readjusted the White Balance, this time using the name tag as my white.

HTTP response: NOT FOUND | MIME changed to 'text/html'

I'll be dogged! I like your treatment - you've maintained the richness of the colors in the windows, while still making it possible to see who's standing in front of them. Thanks for the pointer to the link - I hadn't read that page on Luminous Landscape before, and the technique seems straightforward. I shot with film (on a limited budget for processing) for so long that I still spend a lot of time thinking about the shot and trying to get it right in the camera. I haven't yet learned to take full advantage of the nearly-free nature of digital photography. I do pretty well most times, and hints like this will save the "missed it by that much" shots. Time to go play - to the bat-cave! Thanks again!