How do you programmatically add soft focus to an image

Question

I was wondering how to go about adding soft focus (to blur an image a little bit) The way path.com does on the this page https://path.com/p/35p8q5 (the background image). I dont know if this is possible without using photoshop.

Answer 1

The go-to library (for PHP, Python …) is ImageMagick. Among other, this allows blurring.

Adapting the basic usage example:

<?php
header('Content-type: image/jpeg');

$image = new Imagick('image.jpg');
$image->blurImage(5, 3);
echo $image;
?>