Portrait Blur

Portrait Blur blurs the background of a photo more the farther away it is, and keeps the subject sharp out to the edge of its outline. It runs in your browser and your photo is never uploaded.

What runs on your device

The depth model is published under the Apache 2.0 licence. Its size is the file this site's loader actually fetches, measured on 23 September 2026: 99.2 MB, stated as 100 so it never reads smaller than it is. After the first run your browser keeps the files, and nothing about your photo is sent anywhere.

The blur itself is not a model. Once the depth and the outline are known, everything else is arithmetic on your own pixels, and nothing is generated.

How the blur is built

1. The focus. By default it is the subject: the page takes the middle value of the depth under the subject's outline, so an arm reaching toward the camera does not pull the focus off the face.
2. How much each pixel blurs. Anything within a small band of the focus distance stays sharp. Beyond it the blur builds up with distance, in front of the focus as well as behind it, as it does through a real lens.
3. Blur strength sets the largest blur. At 100% it is 4% of the photo's shorter side.
4. Falloff sets how quickly the blur builds. Sudden puts almost everything behind the subject at full blur; gradual keeps things just behind the subject sharper.
5. No glow round the subject. The background is blurred from background pixels only, so the subject's colours do not smear into the backdrop beside it. The subject is then put back on top with its own soft edge, so its edge is exactly as fine as its outline: hair and fur the outline takes in stay sharp, and stray strands it misses count as background and blur with it.

The blur is rendered at six strengths and each pixel is blended between the two nearest to its own, so the blur grows smoothly with distance rather than in visible steps.

Choosing what stays sharp

Click or tap the photo. With a keyboard, move to the photo and use the arrow keys: each press moves the focus point 5% of the photo, or 1% with Shift held, starting from the middle. Whatever is at that distance stays sharp, and everything nearer or farther blurs, including the subject if you chose a point away from it. Clicking the subject, pressing Enter on the photo, or pressing Focus on the subject goes back to the default.

After the first run, changing the focus, the strength or the falloff re-renders from the depth and outline the page already has, so nothing downloads again.

Without the depth model

If you choose Not now, the page can still blur the background, but evenly: everything outside the subject's outline gets the same blur, with no falloff. It needs Keep the subject sharp for that, because without depth or an outline there is nothing to tell the subject from the background. If the background remover finds no clear subject in the photo, the page says so, and allowing the depth model is the way forward.

Without the subject outline

If you untick Keep the subject sharp, the focus follows the depth map alone. The depth map is coarser than your photo, so the edge between the subject and the background is softer, fine detail such as hair can blur, and some of the subject's colour can spread into the blur next to it. The page says so under the result when that happens.

Open in Editor

Open in Editor takes the blurred photo to the image editor as a whole photograph, so you can crop, adjust and export it there.

In the image editor

Portrait Blur is also in the image editor, in two places that run the same blur as this page: More Tools, which has a Blur strength slider, and the AI Tools panel. Both ask about the same 100 MB depth model, and your answer here, there or in either panel is remembered on this device for all of them.

In the editor the subject outline comes from the image's own mask, so run AI Background Removal on the photo first. Without an outline and without the depth model there is nothing to blur around, and the editor says so. After the blur runs, the image's mask covers the whole photo, so the canvas shows the blurred background. One Undo (or Ctrl+Z) puts back both the photo and the outline it had. A second run on the same image has no outline left, so with the depth model it focuses on the middle of the photo, and it says so.

Limits worth knowing

• The depth is an estimate. It comes from one photo and it can be wrong. We checked it on five photorealistic test images (a portrait, a dog on grass, headphones on a table, a street and a busy cafe), all computer-generated rather than taken with a camera, and near and far came out in the right order on all five. We have not tested glass, mirrors or reflections.
• No bokeh discs. The blur is smooth, so bright points become soft glows, not the round highlights a real lens makes.
• Blurred foreground edges. Where something blurred in the foreground overlaps something sharp behind it, its edge stays crisper than a real lens would leave it.
• Cutouts are refused. A PNG with a transparent background has nothing behind the subject to blur. Use the original photo.
• Large photos are scaled. A photo larger than the working limit this device can hold safely is scaled down to that limit first, and the page says so.