Feb 282014
 

Blurring facesQ: I do therapy work with people and horses.  I love taking pictures while the people are with the horses, but I need to preserve their privacy before I show the pictures to anyone else.  When Picasa had the Creative Kit option, I would use the Focal Pixelate feature to make the faces unrecognizable.  Is there a way to do that now with Picasa?

Melinda

A: You’re in luck!  I have discovered a way to do this.  On the last tab of editing tools, you will see a Pixelate option.  That will pixelate the entire picture.  But … if you hold down the shift key, you will notice that “Pixelate” becomes “Focal Pixelate!”  Who knew?!  Then, there’s one last step.  “Focal Pixelate” will pixelate the entire picture except a circle around a focal point.  What we want is to pixelate only a circle around a focal point.  To do that, you click on the Reverse checkbox.

reverse

Now, you need to set the focal point to a face.  You should notice that your mouse is a green crosshairs and wherever you click will set the focal point to that spot.  Then adjust the sliders until the pixelation is strong enough to make the face unrecognizable – that’s the Impact slider.  The Radius slider controls the size of the circle.  Edge Hardness refers to the outline of the circle, it’s better to have it soften so as to blend with the rest of the picture.  When it looks how you want, click Apply.

You can repeat this process if you have multiple faces that need to be blurred.

This feature can also be used to blur some text, just realize that you are limited to a circular area.

Creative Kit is Picmonkey.com

You might also want to know that all the features you knew and loved in Creative Kit are available in the online photo-editing website called Picmonkey.  Teeth whitening, suntan, arrows, speech bubbles, hearts, mustaches, and so much more.  Picmonkey allows you to edit pictures from your computer, Dropbox, Facebook, or Flickr

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  12 Responses to “Blurring Someone’s Face”

  1. Brilliant – thank you!

  2. My version of picsa does not work – what version are you guys using

  3. Very helpful..Thanks for your geekiness to make us geek..

  4. Thanks so much, this helped tremendously!!!

  5. thanks it did work.

  6. Thanks, it’s very helpful.
    But, I can’t access to Picmonkey. My office internet blocked this site. 🙁

  7. Wow — it really works. I don’t know why you thought of holding down the shift key but thanks.

  8. Thanks so much-didn’t know about holding shift to get other options. Sometimes I want to blur out the background and I wish there was an easier way but this method worked too.

  9. I am really enjoying all you hints.. Thank you.

  10. […] https://picasageeks.com/2014/02/blurring-someones-face/ If you use Picasa, and miss the Creative Kit option Focal Pixelate, check out this post for a solution. […]

  11. Chris,
    That’s a great tip on pixelating the face (on an area in a pic). My question is how did you ever think of holding down the SHIFT key to get to that?

  12. Thanks for some very useful info about using Focal Pixelate edit. I wonder how many other edit features respond to the shift key.

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