A wide lens holds everything in focus at once, which is exactly why a phone photo of a street can look flat. The blur tool in Telegram's editor puts the focus back where you want it, after the fact.
There are two shapes to choose from and they do genuinely different things. One isolates a subject; the other makes a city look like a model railway.
What you will be able to do
- check_circle Choose between the circular and the linear blur for the picture in front of you.
- check_circle Move, resize and rotate the focus area with one two-finger gesture.
- check_circle Get the miniature effect to work, instead of a photo that just looks smeared.
- check_circle Recognise the photos where this tool is the wrong idea.
The two fingers are doing three things at once — moving the band, widening it, and rotating it to follow the road.
lens_blur Why a blurred edge reads as depth
A camera with a large aperture keeps a thin slice of the scene sharp and lets everything nearer and further fall away. We read that softness as distance, without thinking about it. A phone's small sensor and wide lens produce almost none of it, so everything arrives equally sharp and the picture loses its sense of depth.
Adding the falloff afterwards is a convincing imitation as long as it follows a plausible plane. That is the whole trick, and it is why the two shapes exist: a circle for a subject that sits at one distance, a band for a scene that recedes.
The miniature effect comes from the same reading run backwards. We only ever see this thin a plane of focus on things a few centimetres away, so when a photograph of a whole city has it, the brain concludes the city must be small.
Circle, band, or neither
The choice follows the picture, not taste. Three cases, and the third is the one worth knowing.
center_focus_strong Circular — one subject at one distance
view_stream Linear — a scene that recedes
cancel When not to use it
One line: a circle for a subject, a band for a scene with distance in it, and nothing for a flat image.
settings Applying it
- Open the photo in the editor Attach it, tap the thumbnail, then tap the sliders icon in the bottom toolbar.
- Scroll along to Blur It sits with the other correction controls rather than on its own tab.
- Pick circular or linear The two shapes are offered as soon as the tool opens.
- Place it with one gesture Drag to move the focus area, pinch to make it larger or smaller, and twist to rotate the linear band.
- Set the strength, then back it off Almost everyone's first attempt is too strong. Reduce it until you stop noticing it and stop there.
This page is one tool in the editor. The curriculum step covers the canvas it lives on: the drawing and text layers, scrubbing a video to the frame you want to work on, and where editing sits between choosing a file and sending it.
At a glance
- 1Circle or line
Radial blur for a subject, linear blur for a scene.
- 2Move the focus
Pinch and rotate the focus area with two fingers.
- 3Miniature effect
Works best from above on wide scenes.
Updated
