Bokeh Effect
Blur the background like a fast lens and turn its bright points into real bokeh balls. Drag the focus ring onto your subject.
or browse filesdrop an image here or paste
.png
Blur the background like a fast lens and turn its bright points into real bokeh balls. Drag the focus ring onto your subject.
or browse filesdrop an image here or paste
Drag on the picture to move the focus.
Drop a picture on the page and the background falls away like it was shot on a fast lens: soft, creamy blur, and every bright point in it spread into a round bokeh ball. Drag the dashed ring onto your subject to say what stays sharp, then set Blur for how far out of focus the rest goes and Bokeh balls for how much the highlights bloom into discs. Street lights, fairy lights, sun on water, gaps in leaves and specular glints on metal are what turn into balls - the same things that do it in a real photograph. It works on any JPG, PNG or WebP, at whatever size you opened it.
Open a photo, then do three things. Drag anywhere on the picture to put the focus ring over your subject; drag Blur until the background is as far gone as you want; drag Bokeh balls until the highlights look like light rather than mush. Keep sharp chooses the shape of the focus: an Oval for a subject, a Band for a horizontal strip of the scene, or Nothing to throw the whole frame out of focus for a background image or a wallpaper. Focus size sets how big the sharp area is. Hold the compare button in the corner to see the original, press R to reset, then download as PNG, JPG or WebP, or copy the result to the clipboard. The dashed focus ring is a guide on screen only - it is never in the file you save.
This is the difference that matters, and it is what the previous version of this page got wrong. Bokeh is not softness; it is the shape a point of light takes when it is out of focus. In a lens, a point that is not in the focal plane lands on the sensor as a disc - its circle of confusion - and it keeps its brightness while it does, which is why a night photo full of distant lights turns into a photo full of glowing balls.
Averaging does the opposite. Run a blur over that same photo and each bright point is smeared across its neighbourhood, so it gets dimmer the more you blur: the picture goes soft and the lights disappear into it. That is a soft-focus filter, not a lens.
So this page builds the out-of-focus layer in two parts. The body of the picture is blurred properly, and then the picture's own highlights are put back over it as discs the size of the blur radius, added like light rather than painted on. Turn Bokeh balls down to zero and you get the plain background blur - which is the right answer for some pictures, and is all the old page could do.
A subject is almost never in the middle of the frame, so the focus area is a visible dashed ring you drag onto it - press anywhere on the picture and it goes there. Oval is the portrait case: one person, one plate of food, one product on a table. Band keeps a horizontal strip sharp, which suits a landscape with a foreground and works like a soft version of the tilt shift effect when you want a miniature look instead. Nothing blurs everything, for a wallpaper, a website hero, a video-call background or anything text is going to sit on top of.
The transition from sharp to blurred is a gradient rather than a hard line, so there is no visible edge around the subject. This is a lens effect applied by area, not a cut-out: it cannot tell a person from the wall behind them, so a subject that overlaps the edge of the ring will be partly soft. For hiding a face or a licence plate, which is a different job with a different standard, use blur image; for a whole-photo softening, the same page does that too.
Blur is the size of the circle of confusion, as a fraction of the picture - which is the same thing as how wide the aperture would have been and how far behind the subject the background is. Low values give the gentle separation of a portrait lens at f/2.8; high values give the deep bokeh of a long lens wide open - a shallow depth of field generator for a picture that was taken with everything in focus, where the background is only colour and light. Because it is a fraction and not a pixel count, the preview and the exported file show the same photograph, on a phone snapshot and a 24 megapixel camera file alike. The image details card gives the radius in real pixels at full size.
Bokeh balls sets how far down the brightness scale a point has to be before it counts as a highlight, and how strongly it blooms. Turn it up on a night scene and the whole background fills with discs; turn it down on a daylight portrait, where there is nothing bright enough to bloom and the balls would just look like a filter.
The preview and the download run the same code over the pixels, so the file you save is what you were looking at, at the resolution you opened it, with no watermark and no signup. Nothing is uploaded: the photo is decoded and blurred inside your browser, which is the point when the picture is a portrait, a family photo or client work. Transparency is kept.
Related pages: blur image to blur a whole picture or cover a face, tilt shift for the miniature effect, glow effect to bloom the highlights without blurring anything, and vignette effect to darken the edges of the frame after the background is gone.
Bokeh is the appearance of the out-of-focus parts of a photograph in photography - specifically, the way points of light in them are rendered. A lens turns each out-of-focus point into a disc the shape of its aperture, so distant lights become balls. The word covers the quality of that blur, not the amount of it, which is why two lenses with the same depth of field can have very different bokeh.
Open the photo on this page, drag the dashed ring onto whatever should stay sharp, and set the Blur and Bokeh balls sliders by eye. Then download it. Nothing is installed, nothing is uploaded, there is no watermark, and the file comes back at its original size.
There is probably nothing bright enough in the picture. Only points near white become discs, because that is what happens in a lens - a mid-grey background just goes soft. Raise the Bokeh balls slider, which lowers the brightness a point has to reach, and if nothing appears then the photo has no specular highlights to work with. Night scenes, backlit leaves, water and city lights give the strongest result.
You can get very close, with one difference worth knowing. A phone builds a depth map and cuts the person out of the scene; this page applies the blur by area, using the focus ring you place. On a subject that fits inside the ring the result is the same idea, and on a busy edge - hair against a bright background, say - a phone will be cleaner. Making the focus area a little larger than the subject usually looks better than trying to trace it exactly.
No. The picture is not resized or re-encoded on the way through, and the sharp part of the photo is the untouched original, pixel for pixel - the blur is composited around it. Saving as PNG keeps the result exactly; JPG and WebP re-encode, which is their usual small loss.
No. The photo is read straight from your device into the page, blurred there by your browser, and handed back as a download. It never reaches a server, which matters because the photos people put a bokeh background on are usually portraits of people they know.