Blur Background

Blur Background gives an ordinary photo the look of a portrait-mode shot. It finds the main subject, keeps it crisp, and blurs everything behind it, so a cluttered kitchen or a busy street melts into soft colour and the eye goes straight to the subject.

The blur imitates a real lens rather than smearing the picture. Each out-of-focus point spreads into a round disc, and the work is done in linear light, the way light really adds up, so street lights and sun through leaves bloom into glowing bokeh instead of turning grey. The subject is lifted out before blurring, so no ghostly halo of it appears in the blur.

Finding the subject uses the same open-source ISNet model as our Background Remover, running inside your browser. It downloads from this site once (about 44 MB) and is then kept, and both tools share that copy. Your photo never leaves your device, and there is no watermark, sign-up or daily limit.

1. Press “Choose a photo”, drop one onto the box, or paste one. The first time, wait while the model downloads.
2. Wait a few seconds, then drag the round handle to compare before and after.
3. Move “Blur strength” for more or less blur and “Bright spots (bokeh)” to make highlights glow. Use “Darken background” or “Black and white background” to push the subject forward even more.
4. If an ear, a hand or a bag strap is blurred by mistake, press “Touch up by hand”, choose “Keep sharp” and paint over it. Choose “Blur it” to soften something that should be in the background.
5. Open “Edges” to soften or shrink the outline, pick JPG, PNG or WebP under “Save as” and press the Download button.

• Automatic subject finding with an AI model on your own device, on the graphics chip (WebGPU) where the browser allows, otherwise on the processor.
• Lens-style disc blur in linear light, from off up to a disc 4.5% of the photo’s long side, with adjustable highlight bloom for bokeh.
• The subject is lifted out before blurring and the gap is filled from its surroundings, so no halo of the subject shows in the blur.
• Background treatments: darken it up to 80% and turn it partly or fully black and white, while the subject keeps its colour.
• A brush to fix the mask: “Keep sharp” and “Blur it”, with size, softness, undo and redo (⌘Z or Ctrl+Z), and “Show blurred areas” to tint the blurred part red.
• Edge controls: feather for a gentle fade between sharp and blurred, and shrink or grow to tighten or loosen the outline.
• Saves at full size, the same width and height as your photo, as JPG (92% quality), PNG or WebP. Photos over 16 megapixels are first scaled to 16 MP.
• Opens JPG, PNG, WebP, AVIF, GIF, BMP, HEIC, TIFF and SVG.

• Photos with one clear subject work best: a person, a pet, a product, a plant. A crowd or a landscape has no single subject to keep sharp.
• Bokeh shows up best when the background has small lights or bright gaps, such as fairy lights, windows or leaves against the sky.
• Fine hair is the hardest part. Zoom in after the first pass, and use a soft “Keep sharp” brush along the hairline if strands went missing.
• The blur is worked out on a smaller copy (up to 1024 pixels across, less for strong blurs), then smoothly enlarged. That is invisible on a strong blur, but at the lowest settings the background can look a touch softer than a real camera.