Gaussian blur, sharpen, pixelate, film grain, and vignette, everyday effects that run in the tab, not on a filter site.
Runs in your browser · Nothing uploaded
These are the effects people reach for after colour is already fine: soften a background, crisp up a slightly soft JPEG, mosaic a face, add grain so a digital still doesn't look like plastic, darken the edges. They aren't a filter pack with fifty presets named after cities.
Pixelate is also a redaction tool. It is better than a black box when you still want the frame to make sense, and worse than deleting the pixels if someone is determined to undo a light mosaic. For a passport number, use a heavy pixelate or the redact tool under Text & Annotation.
All of them bake into a new image. There's no “smart object.” Download when it looks right.
Gaussian blur softens by radius. Small values take the edge off JPEG crunch or skin. Large values turn the frame into atmosphere. It isn't a portrait-mode depth map, the whole image blurs unless you combine it with a crop or a separate layer in a real editor.
Sharpen exaggerates edges. It can make a slightly soft phone photo look snappier. It can't recover a miss. Too much and you get halos, especially on already-compressed JPEGs.
Pixelate turns a region, or the whole frame, depending how you use it, into blocks. Redacting a name on a screenshot, making a thumbnail that isn't the real face, or an 8-bit look. For serious redaction, go heavy; a 4-pixel mosaic on a 12-megapixel still can be reversed.
Film grain adds noise. A little hides banding in a gradient or a sky. A lot is an aesthetic. It will make the file larger if you then save losslessly, because noise doesn't compress well.
Vignette darkens the edges so the centre holds attention. Easy to overdo into a tunnel. Fine for a portrait thumbnail; odd on a screenshot of a UI.
Only if the blocks are large relative to the feature. A light mosaic on a high-resolution still can be reconstructed. For anything you would not want reconstructed, use a large pixel size, or black it out with the redact tool, and check the download at 100% zoom.
No. It increases local contrast along edges that already exist. A blurry photo becomes a crunchy blurry photo. Reshoot, or live with it.
Digital stills, especially after heavy compression or a steep gradient, can band. A little grain breaks that up. It is also a look. It isn't a quality improvement in the PSNR sense, it's a choice.
There is no server to upload to. Each page is a static file, and the work happens in your browser. Your file is read from disk into memory, processed, and handed back as a download. Once the page has loaded you can disconnect from the network and it keeps working. The longer explanation
