Blur Image
Apply custom blur effects to your images. Perfect for creating depth of field effects, hiding sensitive information, or adding artistic blur to your photos.
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How blurring works, and when it is safe
A blur replaces each pixel with a weighted average of its neighbours. A Gaussian blur weights those neighbours by a bell curve, which is why it looks smooth and natural rather than smeared. The radius controls how far the averaging reaches: a small radius softens, a large one destroys detail entirely.
That distinction matters when blurring is used to hide something. A light blur is reversible in principle — the original detail is still statistically present, and deblurring techniques have recovered faces and text from weakly blurred images more than once. Pixelation has the same weakness. If you are hiding a face, a licence plate, a card number, or an address, use a heavy blur with a large radius, or cover the area with a solid shape instead, which removes the information outright.
Why we built this tool
Two very different needs meet here: the aesthetic one, where a blurred background isolates a subject or softens a busy photograph, and the privacy one, where a face, a name badge, a house number, or an on-screen credential must be hidden before publishing.
In the privacy case, uploading the unblurred image to a website is precisely the wrong move — the face you are trying to protect is what you just transmitted. Ours applies the blur on a canvas in your browser and exports the flattened result locally, so the original never leaves your device and the exported file contains no recoverable layer beneath the blur. No upload, no size limit, no account.
Tips and common mistakes
- Use a heavy radius for privacy work; light blurring and pixelation have both been reversed in published research.
- Faces, licence plates, screens, house numbers, and name badges are the usual things people forget to check.
- Blur, export, then reopen the exported file to confirm nothing is legible.
- For absolute certainty, cover the area with a solid shape instead of blurring it.
Quick start: using Blur Image
- Load the image you want to blur.
- Select the region to blur, or apply it to the whole picture for a background effect.
- Set the radius — go heavy if the purpose is to hide identifiable detail.
- Zoom in on the blurred area and confirm nothing is still legible.
- Export the flattened image and share only that version.
For guaranteed removal, cover the area with a solid shape using Annotate Image. Photos also carry hidden location data — check it with Extract EXIF.