Blur background‪.‬ 4+

So the iPhone SE third generation will do portrait mode but only if there's a person in the photo. I take a lot of photos of my dogs and I want to be able to do portrait mode with them. This app will change any photo where it can detect anything in the foreground and do a great bokeh effect. Looks exactly like the built in portrait mode. And you could choose how much of the blurred background you want from 0 to 100%. It was a little tricky to learn how to use it at first since there's no instructions, but it's really easy once you figure it out. Only problem is, looks like the developer is no longer supporting it since the last version came out 4 years ago as of April 2025.

I just tried it out and I’m impressed. I don’t know of another app that does what this one does. ‘Specially not a free app. All I can say is try it on one of your photos, and see if you’re not impressed. And get it while it’s free! Thank you to the developer, I know I’m going to use this a lot.

So might feel that the interface is not very intuitive, but since there was no button to push to go to photo albums, I had to experiment. I opened my photos selected a photo then went back to this app and the selected photo showed up in the little window and I was able to use it. Good luck and have fun with it.

The app does a pretty good job of isolating the subject before applying the blur, and the two edit tools are useful to tweak the “coverage” of the to-be-blurred area. The problem is the sharpness “fall-off” from the subject’s sharp edge to blur should be more gradual, not so abrupt from sharp to blur, regardless of the amount of blur setting.

The effect looks its best if the amount slider is used minimally, and avoiding a heavy-handed max blur approach. In my particular image test, I needed an “appropriate amount” of maximum blur applied to background objects of varying degrees of distance from the subject, but the end result looked exaggerated and “obvious” as the fall-off went abruptly from sharp to max blur over the entire image. Everything was the same level of blur.

To real life the “depth of field” of wide aperture lenses, the transition is very subtle/gradual, going from sharpness to blur in front and in back of the subject, a very difficult effect to mimic in post processing.

Another suggestion, making the app Universal to facilitate better edits using an iPad would be an improvement. The app works OK on the iPad, but there is a lot of wasted screen real estate.

A very good effort that will work pretty well for some images if used sparingly, but could use additional improvements.