Choose a blur construction. Soft two-axis averaging or a deliberate horizontal or vertical smear, with the radius stated in pixels.
This is a rebuild: your photo is taken apart and remade, not just recoloured. It runs in this tab and nothing is uploaded.
Tip Hard edges, lights and text reveal direction clearly; an already soft photograph may show little change at small radii.
The operation behind the appearance
The soft style averages a horizontal neighbourhood and then averages the result vertically. Directional styles perform only one pass. Every output pixel is therefore an explicit mean of a rectangular line or area, with no semantic subject detection and no hidden depth estimate.
The controls are measurements
- Blur direction
- Two-axis soft, horizontal smear or vertical smear.
- Radius
- How far the average reaches on each active axis.
Where the construction breaks
A uniform radius treats foreground, subject and distant background equally. It cannot reproduce optical depth of field. Directional blur can also make bright points stretch into bands that dominate the frame, and a large two-axis radius can erase the exact subject separation the image needed.
The preview, draft and export all run the same kernel. Parameters measured in pixels are scaled with the source, so a chosen tile, band or radius does not become unexpectedly finer in the downloaded file.
Questions about this effect
Is soft blur Gaussian?
No. It is a separable box average: horizontal then vertical. The algorithm is stated because its edge response differs from a Gaussian even when both look soft.
What do horizontal and vertical modes simulate?
A one-axis average produces a directional smear. It can suggest motion, but it is not deconvolution and does not estimate what a camera actually did.
Why does a large radius darken or lighten edges?
Samples outside the frame are clamped to the nearest edge pixel. A strong border colour therefore contributes repeatedly near the boundary.
Related on this site
- Edge detectA Sobel luminance gradient map with threshold and inversion.
- PaintingSmoothed regions, reduced colour steps and measured contour weight.
- PixelateSquare or hexagonal blocks, each one flat, with optional palette quantisation.
- Filter picture online41 colour looks and 20 effects, chosen from your own photograph rather than from a list of names.
Rendered on your computer, not on a server.