About Blur image

Blur image hides parts of a picture — a face, a plate number, a name on a screenshot — under a pixelation or a blur, and saves the picture with them in it.

Drag on the picture over each thing that has to go. Every area can be moved, resized and removed, and shows its effect while you draw it, so you can see what it covers before anything is saved.

Pixelate replaces the area with blocks, each the average color of the pixels under it. Pixel size is the block’s side in the picture’s own pixels, so it is the same on screen as in the file; Gap leaves a line between blocks and Shape makes them round, filled behind with the area’s overall color, so neither shows anything of what was there. Larger blocks hide more: a block as big as a letter leaves nothing to read.

Each area can be rounded: select it and drag the small handle inside its top-left corner, or press [ and ]. Pulled all the way in, a box becomes a pill, and a square becomes a circle that sits on a face the way a box does not.

A blur is the gentler look and the weaker one: a light blur over large writing can still be made out, and a familiar face is often still recognized by the people who know it. For names, numbers and anything identifying, use Pixelate with large blocks.

The picture is drawn again with the areas covered and saved as a new file, which also leaves its camera data behind. The covered pixels are gone from it, not hidden under a layer someone could lift — but keep the original to yourself, since it still has them. For a PDF, use Redact, which does the same to pages.