Blur the background of a photo

How it works

1. Drop photos with one clear subject in them: a person, a product, a plate of food, a pet, a plant, a car. Several can be done in one run.
2. Choose the strength. Light blurs by 1.2% of the photo's short side, medium by 2.5% and strong by 5%, so the effect looks the same on a small phone photo and on a large one.
3. Press Blur background. The tool looks for a face first and picks a model to match, then downloads it with its runtime the first time: about 5 MB for the general model, about 16 MB for the portrait one. These are the same files the background remover uses, so if you have used that tool nothing extra is fetched.
4. Download the result. Files keep their name with -blur added, so your original is left as it is.

Frequently asked questions

Does it work on products, pets and scenery?

On products, food, pets, plants and cars, yes: a photo with no face in it goes to U-2-Net small, a model that looks for the one main subject in a picture. On hand-checked masks over 30 object photos it scores 0.891 mean IoU against 0.719 for the portrait model, which on objects returns nothing usable at all (0.007 on a wooden chair, 0.08 on a beer bottle). Scenery with nothing in front of it has no subject to keep sharp, so there is nothing to separate; to soften a part of any picture you choose yourself, mark the area in Pixelate part of an image, which has a blur effect.

Is this the same as portrait mode on a phone?

Not quite. A camera lens blurs things more the further away they are; here the whole background is blurred by the same amount, which reads as depth of field but is not the real thing. It is a way to tidy a distracting background, not a substitute for a real camera aperture.

Can it keep two things sharp?

No. It keeps one main subject sharp. Several equally prominent objects give an unpredictable subset of them, and a small object in a busy scene can lose to the scene: a pair of scissors photographed on a car came back as the car. It finds the thing in the picture, not the thing you meant, so crop to your subject before blurring.

Why is the background seen through a glass still sharp?

Transparent and reflective areas are treated as part of the subject's outline. A glass or a bottle counts as a solid shape, so whatever shows through it stays as sharp as the glass itself instead of softening with the rest of the background.

Are my photos uploaded?

No. The model is loaded into your browser and the blur is computed on your device. It is downloaded once and kept by the browser, so later uses start straight away and work offline.

Why does the edge of the hair look soft?

The sharp subject is cut out along the matte the model produces, so the finest details, hair strands or a thin plant stem, can come out softer than the rest of the subject. A subject large in the frame against a background that differs in colour gives the cleanest edge.

What are the free limits?

The free plan handles 3 images per run, 20 MB each and 10 runs per day. Pro removes these limits.