Blur image

A Gaussian blur softens an image by averaging each pixel with its neighbours, smoothing out detail and noise. A light blur is great for backgrounds behind text, for a dreamy aesthetic, or for de-emphasising part of a picture; a heavy blur turns a photo into soft colour shapes.

This tool uses the browser native blur, so it is fast even on large images, and everything is processed locally — your photo is never uploaded. For hiding truly sensitive information, prefer pixelation, since a very strong blur can occasionally be partly undone.

Blur strength is relative to image size. The same slider position that melts a small screenshot into haze may barely soften a 12-megapixel photo, because the blur radius covers a smaller fraction of the frame. So judge by the preview rather than by numbers you used last time, and if you plan to shrink the image afterwards, check how it reads at that smaller size — downscaling makes any blur look milder.

A light blur doubles as crude noise reduction. Grainy low-light photos and heavily compressed images are full of single-pixel speckle, and averaging neighbouring pixels smooths that speckle away — at the cost of edge sharpness, which is why dedicated denoisers try to preserve edges while a Gaussian blur treats everything equally. For a backdrop, a texture or a thumbnail, that trade-off is usually fine; for a photo you want to keep crisp, keep the radius small.