Is the bg one layer or two? if it's one, then whatever you did to it makes it look flat, which is never a good thing.

biggest mistake made by walling noobs is relying on filters to make images work together. generally duplicating te layer, and making an adjustment, then changing the opacity and setting. it looks to me like you have a duplicate set to overlay, possibly soft light. that has a dramatic effect on the colors of the image, generally making them over saturated and too bright, unless you really know what you're doing, it's not a good practice to get into.

you need to learn your way around the adjustments, and adjustment layers. best way to do that is to play with them. go to image/ adjustments for them, or click the adjustment layer button in the layer pallet.

you'll likely find that the most useful adjustments are levels, curves, hue and saturation, and color balance.

use the .psd of this to play with the adjustments to see the difference they make. you'll find that desaturating the bg will make a big difference.

using adjustments are just quick fixes though, so make sure to learn other techniques like vectoring and recg. and very important to learn is proper use of masks, your extractions and blending of layers will improve greatly with mask usage.

good luck.