Blur the background of a photo

A busy background pulls the eye away from the person or the thing the photograph is about. Softening it is the oldest trick in portrait photography — a wide aperture does it in the camera — and this mode does the same after the fact: the subject stays as it was, and everything behind it is blurred by the amount you choose.

It opens with an oval in the middle of the picture as the subject. Drag the oval onto your subject and the background follows. If the subject is a person, press Find the person and a 5.9 MB segmentation model draws their outline on this device instead; once it has been downloaded, it runs by itself whenever you open a picture here.

A background blur is judged by eye. It is never counted as protection, and nothing on this page scores it as a covering.

• Lower the amount first. A lens blurs by distance, so a modest blur reads as a photograph and a heavy one reads as a cut-out.
• Raise Edge softness to make the change from sharp to soft gradual rather than a line.
• Paint with Keep sharp over hair, hands or anything the finder or the oval left soft; paint with Blur more over background it kept.
• Press Original, or hold the backslash key, to compare with the untouched picture.

To soften everything evenly with no subject, use add blur to a photo. To soften one area you choose — a sign, a corner — use blur part of an image. And if the point is that a person in the background must not be recognised, a blur is the wrong tool: cover their face with a solid fill instead.

• The person finder recognises people only. Pets, products and buildings need the oval and the brushes.
• Fine hair and transparent things (glass, veils) are the hardest edges; expect to touch them up.
• An animated GIF or WebP is saved as its first frame.
• JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, BMP and ICO open here. HEIC and TIFF open only where the browser itself reads them.

Does it work on pets or products?

The oval does: place it over a dog, a cup or a shoe and everything outside it softens, with the edge as soft as you set it. The person finder only knows people, so on a pet or a product it will find nothing and say so — use the oval, then the Keep sharp brush to paint the parts of the subject the oval misses.

Why do the edges look cut out, and how do I fix it?

A sharp subject against a heavily blurred background shows any mistake in the edge — a halo of background around the hair, or a hand that went soft. Lower the amount, raise Edge softness so the change is gradual, and paint the edge with Keep sharp and Blur more. A real lens blurs by distance, so a smaller amount usually looks more like a photograph than a larger one.

Is my photo uploaded to find the person?

No. The person finder is a 5.9 MB model that is downloaded once, after you press the button that names its size, and then runs on this device. The photo never leaves the tab; the model comes to it.

Does a blurred background hide the people in it?

Not reliably, and this page does not claim it does. A background blur is a look: faces and signs behind your subject are softened, not removed, and a soft face can still be recognised by someone who knows it. To hide a bystander, cover them with a solid fill in the Privacy mode or on the face page.

Can I save at full size?

Yes. The preview runs on a lighter copy so the controls stay quick, and saving runs the same blur and the same subject mask on the full-resolution picture before it is encoded.