John, First of all great picture. Particularly I like the low vantage point, which make very interesting perspective

My thoughts about the image were that in general I found background too disructive. I agree with Mikes idea of desaturation but I also though about doing something more to make the girl stand out.
I also thought that I need cro it a bit from the left part of the image. In generally I like the skin tones, so I tried to preserve them (almost)

Here is what I've done.

1. Cropping
2. Removing some blemishes from the face (one was very distructive)
3. Noise reduction
4. Duplicate background layer amd apply gaussian blur to it about 25 pix
5. Turn off visibility on the copy layer, switch to original, select all foreground objects, invet selection, feather 5 pix
6. Turn on visibility of blurred layer, switch to it and create mask, bluring this way everything except selection
7. Click on the mask, using eraser correct all selection errors and lighten blur on the upper part of image to create correct illusion of DOF
8. With same selection active use channel mixer on copy layer to desaturate selected background
9. Chaneg opacity of the layer to 70% to alow hint of color in background
10. Smart blur 1.5. pix threshhold 10 to soften the skin
11. Select head and neck and apply shadow & highlights filter to lighten shadows a bit
12. Flatten image
13 Shapenning edges
14. resize