Blurring Someone’s Face

Q: 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.

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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