Effects
Blur, sharpen and watermark your images. All 2 tools are free, with no sign-up and no watermark.
About effects
Blurring and sharpening both work on the edges in an image, in opposite directions. Blur averages each pixel with its neighbours, softening detail; sharpen increases the contrast either side of an edge so it reads as crisper. Neither adds information — sharpening makes existing edges more obvious, it does not recover detail a soft photograph never had.
The most common real use of blur is not an artistic one: hiding a face, a number plate, an address or an account number before an image is published. For that, be generous. A light blur can sometimes be reversed by software, and cropping the region out entirely is safer than blurring it when the information is sensitive.
Sharpening is best applied last, after resizing, and sparingly. Overdone, it produces bright halos along every edge and turns image noise into visible speckle — a look that reads as amateur far more clearly than a slightly soft photograph does.
Effects — frequently asked questions
Sometimes, if the blur is light. Treat blurring as making something hard to read rather than impossible. For anything genuinely sensitive, crop the region away or paint over it with a solid block instead.