How to blur an image in Pillow?

Pillow - Blur image

To blur an image using Pillow library, you can use Image.filter() function with ImageFilter.BLUR kernel filter.

Python Pillow - Blur Image

Steps to blur an image

Follow these steps to blur a given image.

  1. Import Image, and ImageFilter modules from Pillow library.
  2. Read input image using Image.open() function.
  3. Call filter() function on the read Image object and pass ImageFilter.BLUR as argument to the function. The function returns blurred image as PIL.Image.Image object.
  4. Save the returned image to required location using Image.save() function.

Syntax of filter() function

The syntax of filter() function from PIL.Image module is

PIL.Image.filter(filter_kernel)
ParameterDescription
filter_kernelA filter kernel that applies to the given image. To blur the image, you can use ImageFilter.BLUR filter kernel.

Returns

The function returns a PIL.Image.Image object.

Examples

1. Blur a given image

In the following example, we read an image test_image.jpg, blur this image using Image.filter() function, and save the blurred image as blurred_image.jpg.

Python Program

from PIL import Image, ImageFilter

# Open the image
image = Image.open("test_image.jpg")

# Blur the image
blurred_image = image.filter(ImageFilter.BLUR)

# Save the resulting image
blurred_image.save("blurred_image.jpg")

Original Image [test_image.jpg]

Python Pillow - Blur Image - Input

Resulting Image with BLUR effect [blurred_image.jpg]

Python Pillow - Blur Image - Output

Summary

In this Python Pillow Tutorial, we learned how to blur a given image using PIL.Image.filter() function, with the help of examples.