[photoshop-beginners] "Night background", daylight subject

I am fairly new to Photoshop, probably have enough knowledge to graduate from Newbie to Beginner. I still don't understand things like masks and curves and I believe that's what I need now. I have a normal picture taken in the middle of the day and I want to have the whole photo look light night or twilight, but I want my subject to stay bright and in focus, I may even add a bokeh or depth of field blur to the background also, not sure, have to try each way. However, I have no clue how to pull this off. As some background, I was watching an old movie called South Pacific. They used the techniques of filming in broad daylight through some sort of filter so the whole thing looked like night, sort of a transparent blue/black. Then I saw a photo that was taken this way:

http://i1294.photobucket.com/albums/b613/1611kjb/LeerJetSimulator_zpsc07f5197.jpg

The photo was apparently done in a studio fashion with backlighting, front lighting, and either the lights down low or they may have used Photoshop themselves. In any event, I am trying to achieve the effects in this photo. How do I do that? I assume it's going to have some king of layers, the layers will have to be adjusted for the colors and then merged back together and I assume some kind of masking and/or curves to get the various types of lighting and shading as in the picture. I don't even know if there is a name for this process, but it is fairly common. Is there a tutorial or something that would explain how to do this? If not, what techniques do I have to learn to acheive this result?



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