[request] Blur tool

[cyrinux]

Hi,

First thanks for this cool project !

Cool you please add the basic blur tool in swappy?

Best regards

[jtheoof]

Thanks for the feedback @cyrinux . Snappy on macOS does not have a blur tool. Could you describe a little more what you'd want?

[cyrinux]

Hi @jtheoof , I use before ksnip https://github.com/ksnip/ksnip you can see on this page a presentation of some tool.
Bluring tool is to hide a sensible information for example, you see?
Ksnip was really good but too many deps from kde for me and @maximbaz ;)
Tell me if you need more information.

[jtheoof]

Thanks @cyrinux I'll see how I can do that with cairo

[jtheoof]

@cyrinux I hacked around blur and cairo over the weekend. It's not perfect, cursor and performance need some more love. But should do the trick if you don't abuse blurring.

Let me know what you think.

[cyrinux]

Hi @jtheoof , thanks !
That make the job 🥳 , I hope you appreciate my entertainment suggestion 🤣 .

After I can suggest to make it even better:

• Add possibility to draw a bluring rectangle, to be able to quick and neat blur a text zone for example.(this will maybe help for my second point above)
• About performance, on laptop with my trackpad, sometimes I feel my finger move is smooth but this create no-blurred hole all on my way, I understand this depend on the speed, don't know what you can do for this.
• The drop water icon need maybe gray polishing as other tools?
  

Thanks you very much its already functional ;) 💯

[maximbaz]

Thank you very much @jtheoof! I'll add just a couple of points from my side too:

1. I agree that a blur rectangle would be a better implementation than a blur brush, more often one needs to hide sensitive area of the screenshot, let that be some text or a picture, and it's much much faster to draw a rectangle, inside which everything must get blurred. Maybe this will even be more efficient performance-wise, if you know the rectangle in advance, instead of following the cursor?

2. The math on scaled displays seems to be currently off, I have 2.5 scale, and when I drag a mouse cursor with blur tool, the blurring happens in a different place of the screenshot, not where my mouse cursor is 🙂

[jtheoof]

Thanks for the feedback guys, I'll reopen the issue and work on improving the blurring in future work.

[jtheoof]

I've added a more natural rectangle-ish aspect to the blur. @cyrinux @maximbaz if you give it a try and le me know :) I removed the blur as brush aspect.

I created #20 to track performance issues.

[maximbaz]

Thank you very much @jtheoof! I can tell you that the "usage experience" is just perfect now, rectangle is truly what we needed. It works well on my scaled display as well now 👍

If you are still not sick of us and seeking for further improvement ideas (😄), one thing I would change is "strength" of the blur. Here's an example of me applying blur N times to try to hide the text, I would argue that even after 5 times the blurred text can be recognized.

I have two ideas: either simply play with constants to make the blur a lot more aggressive, or replace blur with pixelate algorithm? A random example of what it might look like:

[cyrinux]

Hi, thanks @jtheoof ,
I want to do the same remark as @maximbaz about the strengh of the blur.
Other things are good !

[maximbaz]

I just saw that blur level is actually configurable, with 500 being the max value. I would argue that even that is not enough, and blurring 5 times with level 500 is still quite "readable" (especially if you can guess the pattern of the text being hidden), but 10 times 500 level is what I would already consider enough for hiding a sensitive content 🙂

[jtheoof]

OK thanks I'll play around to provide more effective blur.

EDIT: The problem is more noticeable on scaled displays because the fonts are so crisp. Takes more pass to actually blur effectively. I'll think of a more UI friendly way to blur than just smashing the blur level + button.

[jtheoof]

See #22

[jtheoof]

@cyrinux @maximbaz With #25 I've done some improvements with bluring algo and rendering. Should now be much smoother and scale well on High DPI displays. Let me know what you think.

[cyrinux]

Hi @jtheoof cool yes its smoother for me, and icon is better :-)

[maximbaz]

I agree @jtheoof, it is amazing now, thank you once again for your improvements!