Lost in the night - a before and after look at one of my images

Like any other photographer, I have some hard drives that are filled with images I shot during the years. From time to time I do a little "spring cleaning" and delete some of them. Through the time I've deleted some really crappy images but I deleted some really good ones too that evaded my attention at the time. Yesterday the time to do some cleaning came again. Before I started deleting the images, I took a closer look to see if any of them would pop up. One had some potential so I opened it up in Photoshop and started playing around with it to see if I can get something good out of it.
This is the final result.

I'm so sorry I didn't think of recording the editing process but I'll try and walk you through the steps I took to get to the final result.
So, let's get going. The image below is the RAW, unedited image straight out of the camera.

I envisioned it as a moody, dream like image that as a final result could tell a story.
The first thing I did was to open it in Camera Raw and made the minimal necessary adjustments (white balance, contrast, highlights, shadows and curves), then I cropped it to match the rule of thirds.
After that I opened it in Photoshop, duplicated the layer and converted into a smart filter. Then I opened the smart filter in Camera Raw again and did some more adjustments. This time I cooled the image using white balance to give it a night mood, increased the contrast, decreased the shadows, added some blacks and shifted the tonality using curves. Then I hit Ok and got back to Photoshop.
Once in Photoshop I added a curves adjustment layer to further work on the mood of the image. I added some blacks in the shadows and increased the contrast and painted over the areas which I wanted to remain as before, in this case the model's face.

The lamp was looking a little dull, so in order to sell the feeling of night it should be a little brighter. I created a new blank layer and filled it with black then went to Filter->Render->Lens Flare and used a brightness of 40%.
This is how the image looked after adding that effect.

I added a hue/saturation adjustment layer linked to the lens flare layer and using the HUE option, I warmed up a bit the light so it would match the light of a real lamp.
The image seemed still too bright so I added another curves adjustment layer and I further increased the blacks and contrast and painted on the mask the areas that I wouldn't want the effect to be applied. I added a levels adjustment layer to tweak some of the bright areas and used the same technique as before, and painted over the areas that I didn't want the effect to be applied.
This is how the image looked like after all the subtle changes.

In the background you can see a monument that resembles a sword. That element had nothing to do with the image so I cloned that area and removed the distraction.
As a final touch, I like that matte painting look, I added another curves adjustment layer, added three points on the line and crushed the blacks just a little.
The image seemed too saturated for me so I added a hue/saturation layer and decreased the overall saturation of the image.
In short that's how I converted an image that I would otherwise have deleted it into an image that, in the end, I really like.
Again, here's a before and after version of the image.

Before

After