Product:Desktop Blurrifier 1.0.3
Manufacturer:Chris Paveglio
Date Reviewed: Sept 20, 2012
Retail Price: $4.99 Mac App Store
If you’re a desktop wallpaper junkie like I am, you have probably run into the following scenario:
You have a really cool desktop wallpaper. You have icons on your desktop. You can’t seem to find your icons because the desktop image makes them more difficult to spot. So you end up reverting to a wallpaper that’s less ‘busy’. Or you might open up Photoshop to manually blur or adjust your image as needed.
Sounds like fun right? For the occasional desktop wallpaper, manual adjustments are no big deal. But if you frequently like to rotate out your desktop wallpapers like I do, it gets old pretty quick.
Enter Desktop Blurrifier ($4.99 via the Mac App Store), from developer Chris Paveglio. With Desktop Blurrifier, you can quickly and interactively adjust the blurriness, saturation, and exposure of your desktop image to make it easier to find your icons.
When you launch Desktop Blurrifier, you are presented with the following screen.
You can adjust the blurriness and scale of the image through a set of sliders. As you make adjustments, you can interactively preview what your resultant image looks like.
Once you have the image adjusted to your liking, you can save the image out and set it as your desktop.
Clicking on the ‘more’ button (located on the lower left corner of the Desktop Blurrifier window) will present additional options to fiddle with, like image saturation, exposure (how light or dark the image is) and even colorization (which sets your image to monochrome). You can even adjust the image position to your liking.
Desktop Blurrifier works with a wide variety of image formats, including EPS and PDF files. Transparent backgrounds will automatically have a neutral gray background, which can be changed by the user. In my testing, Desktop Blurrifier worked well with multiple monitor setups.
All in all, I’m very impressed by Desktop Blurrifier. It makes little effort of adjusting desktop wallpapers. If you’re a desktop wallpaper nerd who wants absolute control over your backgrounds, Desktop Blurrifier will satisfy your needs. It’s feature rich, flexible and very easy to use.
Desktop Blurrifier earns 5 out of 5 Bob Weiners.
