Dreamin' Big

This LO took me FOREVER to do; I was practicing my photo editing and then I had trouble getting the date font to work. I'm still not sure I like how it came out. The template is a quick page, so that's fine; it's the image itself that's iffy:
This is the photo I started with; Jen took it in 2005 with an inexpensive digital camera I gave her for Christmas that turned out to be fairly useless:
I used a tutorial from The AFX Files at http://actionfx.blogspot.com to try to fix the color, erased all the background clutter (I wasn't too fussy with the background because I knew most of it would get blocked out), and got this:I inserted the image into the quickpage and then decided to try to mess around with PS actions, which I know NOTHING about. Somehow I ended up with the sepia-toned effect and decided to go with it. I'm thinking I probably could have skipped the color correction and gone right to the sepia, except that wasn't my original intent. Here's the LO without the sepia: which do you like better?
Credits:
Template: Sparkleberry QP from Sparkleberry Page kit
Name of the QP designer: Nydia’s Scraps
Name of the kit’s designer: Scrapshana
Name of the store: http://www.digiscrapaganza.com/store/
Date Font: DB Captured Calendar by Lettering Delights