Blur an image with a brush instead of a box

A rectangle is perfect for a line of text and clumsy for everything else.

Faces are round. Signatures wander. A logo on a t-shirt sits at an angle. Cover any of those with a box and you either leave a corner showing or you blur half the photo to be safe. That is when you want to draw the shape yourself.

Brush, or freehand selection?

Worth separating, because tools use the word differently. A paint brush smears as you drag, so the result depends on how steady your hand was and how many times you went over the same spot. A freehand selection traces an outline, closes it into a shape, and blurs everything inside evenly.

The second is what you usually want for privacy work. You get one clean region with consistent coverage instead of a patchy scribble with thin spots. That is what the Draw tool here does: you outline, it fills.

How to use it

1. Open your photo and pick Blur, then switch the shape to Draw.
2. Trace a loop around the thing you want hidden. You do not have to finish exactly where you started — the outline closes itself.
3. Lift your finger or release the mouse. The whole enclosed area blurs at once.
4. Not happy with it? Undo and trace again. Nothing is baked in yet.

Zoom in first if the target is small. Tracing around a face at a fingernail’s size is guesswork. Use the plus button or pinch, get the region filling the frame, then draw.

Trace slightly wide

The most common mistake is hugging the edge exactly. Hair, glasses, and the outline of a jaw all carry recognisable information, and a shape that stops at the skin leaves them. Go a little outside what you think you need — nobody has ever complained that a blur was two pixels too generous.

Same for text. If you are covering a handwritten signature, take the whole flourish, including the tail that runs off to the side.

When to use a box instead

Straight UI elements. An email address in a header, a row in a table, a phone number in a contact card. These are rectangles already, and a box drawn in one drag is faster and neater than an outline.

Mixing is normal. Box the address bar, brush around the face, bar the account number. See blurring one part of an image for the box workflow.

A brush blur is still a blur

Tracing a tidy shape does not change what the filter does inside it. If what you covered is a short code or a card number, switch the tool to Black bar before you draw — the shape works the same way, but it fills solid instead of smearing.

Blur is for “you should not be able to tell who that is.” Solid fill is for “this must not be recoverable.” More on that split in blur versus bar, and on what recovery really looks like in unblur tools.

Try the brush on a photo — it stays on your device the whole time.