How to Blur Part of an Image

This page shows you how to blur or pixelate part of a video image. This technique is normally used to blur a face in order to protect the subject's personality.

 

This technique uses two video tracks, and can be used with any editing purpose which supports multiple tracks/layers. Our example uses Adobe Premiere.

To start on, place the video clip on the timeline. Make an correct copy of the clip and place it on a video track openly above the original clip like so:

 

 

From the effects palette, add a blur or pixelate effect to the top track. Set the amount of blur as desired. The example above uses a Gaussian blur (Video Effects > Blur & Sharpen > Gaussian Blur) set to 30.

 At this stage the entire image on the top track is blurred (or pixelated). To blur only the face, add a crop filter (Video Effects > Transform > Crop) to the top track. Adjust the crop parameters (left, top, right, bottom) until only the blurred face remains.

The screenshot on the right shows the effects we have added: Gaussian Blur and Crop.

Note: If the face (or whatever you are blurring) moves around a lot, there are two options:

Make the blurred area big enough to accommodate the movement.

Use key frames to animate the crop effect.

If you want to Edit your Video

or 

Re-edit video Click here.