AI Background Blur
Blur the background and keep the subject tack sharp: portrait depth of field without a wide lens, with the edges, hair and shoulders left intact.
- Subject stays sharp
- 3 depths
- Natural bokeh
- No watermark
Free credits to start. No watermark.
Background blur is the cheapest way to make a phone photo look intentional. A wide aperture lens separates a subject from a room; software has to fake that separation, and the quality of the fake depends entirely on two things: how cleanly the subject edge is found, and how convincingly the background is defocused.
This AI background blur does both in one pass: the subject stays pixel-sharp including hair and shoulders, while the background is defocused at roughly f/4, f/2 or f/1.2, with bokeh that follows the highlights rather than a uniform smear over the whole frame.
Three depths, and what each one is for
| Strength | Looks like | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
| Soft (f/4) | Background readable, no longer distracting | Interiors, offices, full-body shots where context matters |
| Medium (f/2) | Shapes recognisable, subject clearly separated | Portraits, product shots, profile photos |
| Strong (f/1.2) | Background reduced to colour and light | Hero portraits, thumbnails, anything with a busy background |
Strong blur on a photo where the subject is small makes the picture look empty. The smaller the subject, the softer the blur should be.
How to blur a background in three steps
- 1Upload a photo with a clear subjectJPG, PNG or WEBP up to 4 MB. People, products and pets work best when the subject is separated from the background by at least a little distance in the original shot.
- 2Pick depth and bokeh styleSoft for context, medium for portraits, strong for thumbnails. Portrait bokeh gives round highlights, cinematic warms them, clean keeps it neutral.
- 3Protect what must stay sharpName it: keep the wispy hair, do not blur the label, keep the far wall readable. That single line fixes the most common failure, which is a halo around the edge.
Where blur beats a full background replacement
Replacing a background says something: this is a studio, this is a catalogue, this is a fantasy. Blurring says nothing, which is exactly why it works for a LinkedIn photo, a marketplace listing or a product shot where the room is real and the buyer needs to trust it.
It is also faster to get right. A replacement has to invent a whole scene and match the light; a blur only has to keep what is already there and defocus it, so the lighting, the colour and the reflections stay honest by construction.
Why the edges are the whole game
- Hair and fur are the hardest boundary, because the correct result is a gradient, not a line.
- A visible edge appears when the blur is applied to a hard mask instead of a feathered one.
- Shadows cast by the subject onto the background should blur with the background, not stay sharp.
- Thin straps, glasses arms and jewellery arms are where cut-outs usually fail.
- If an edge looks wrong, lowering the strength fixes more than re-running with a stronger one.
Free background blur vs portrait mode
Phone portrait modes do this in hardware and are excellent on the device they were made for, with one limitation: they only work on photos taken in that mode. A screenshot, a scanned print, a photo from an older phone or a product shot has no depth data, so software is the only option.
The other difference is control. Portrait mode gives you one strength; here you choose the depth and the bokeh character, which is what separates a stock-looking blur from one that matches the lens the photo pretends to be shot on.
Credits, limits and privacy
Blur runs on a paid image model, so it needs an account and uses credits, priced per model and shown before you run. New accounts start with free credits. Uploads are capped at 4 MB, output keeps your aspect ratio up to 1344 pixels, and no watermark is added.
If you need a transparent cut-out rather than a blur, use the Remove Background page instead; if you need the subject on a new scene entirely, that is the Product Photo or Expand pages. Images are sent only for the request and results are stored only for download.
Blur for product and marketplace photos
A product on a shop counter sells worse than the same product with the shop suggested behind it. Blurring the background is the fastest way to get that suggestion without a studio: the shelf, the plant and the window become context instead of clutter, and the buyer's eye lands on the label.
Keep the blur soft for this use. A heavy blur behind a small product produces a picture that looks like a cut-out with a coloured rectangle behind it, whereas a soft defocus still reads as a real place, which is what makes the listing feel trustworthy rather than staged.
Common blur mistakes, and the fix for each
- Halo around hair: the mask was too hard. Lower the strength and ask to keep wispy hair sharp.
- Subject looks pasted: the shadow under the subject stayed sharp while everything else blurred. Ask for the cast shadow to blur with the background.
- Background turned into flat colour: the strength is too high for the subject size. Drop to medium.
- Foreground elements ignored: a chair or a plant in front of the subject should blur too. Name it in the note.
A note on file size and sharpness
Blurring changes how an image compresses: smooth gradients compress well, so a blurred background usually makes the file smaller, while the sharp subject keeps the detail that matters. That is the opposite of what people expect, and it is one more reason a defocused photo often looks better on a marketplace than a busy original at the same resolution.
Blur versus a shallow-depth-of-field lens
A real wide-aperture lens blurs what is far behind the subject progressively, and the transition is smooth because it is optical. Software has to approximate that gradient, which is why a soft setting usually looks more convincing than a strong one on photos that were shot with a phone lens.