Blender Nodes Blur
Set dof distance off by a little so that the object in focus is blurred by the tiniest bit.
Blender nodes blur. Several performance optimizations are also available such as opencl support calculation area restriction and masking. The bilateral blur node allows you to blur an image while preserving the edges. Unlike defocus an in focus region is defined in the compositor. Use a higher f stop which will start the blur and then use the z socket to a map value to a blur node to enhance the blur effect.
The bokeh blur node generates a bokeh type blur similar to defocus. The bokeh button will force the blur node to use a circular blur filter. It uses the vector speed render pass to blur the image pixels in 2d. Can be used to fake motion blur.
This gives higher quality results but is slower than using a normal filter. Add blur and distortion to all of your textures inside the material node editor. There is also more flexibility in the type of blur applied through the bokeh image node. Based off of bartek skorupa s speech at bconf2014.
Use the blur node with a setting of 2 for x and y. You can do this. Rearrange the objects in your scene to use a lower contrast background. The bilateral blur node performs a high quality adaptive blur on the source image allowing to blur images while retaining their sharp edges.