I erase my backgrounds the same way. *high fives* I can't for the life of me figure out how to use the pen tool, so I just zoom in really closely while the image is still large to get as clean of a cutout as possible. Hair's tricky, but luckily doable thanks to layer masks (don't know what I did before them).

Anyway, this is such a great tutorial. I also throw on and move around random textures on different modes to kinda finagle what I want. But using a layer on Exclusion is pretty badass. I don't think I've ever tried that. I usually stay away from the "stranger" blending modes, and only resort to scrolling through them when I get really desperate. This makes me want to give them a try more often though.