Yes, I do recommend tracing over the original with the pen tool. Be sure to post your results.

As for the photo, I can see what you were going for now. Perhaps the specks are just overdone then, because they actually look more angelic than anything, which I'm sure you weren't going for. Take a look at this pic to see what I mean about yours having a bit too much contrast. That pic has a good amount of contrast, and some parts get that white, but a lot of it is that sort of "hazy" gray, so the contrast in that one isn't so overdone. Besides that, since the brightest bits of white are pretty limited in that picture, it's easy to make out what all the darker parts are. When I looked at yours before, I actually didn't see the person there for a while, since the bright parts were so distracting.

One other thing you could do is lower the saturation (color intensity) of your image, since you're going for the post-apocalyptic look. It's actually relatively high in saturation right now. You can lower the saturation with an adjustment layer (Layer > New Adjustment Layer; slide the saturation bar down).

One thing I'm not sure about is how you put that image of the logo in the photo. Is it supposed to be part of the image, or is it just a logo that the image is being branded with? If it's nothing more than a logo, then I don't think any of those extra effects are necessary - you could replace it with your redone version of the logo without those effects.