If you often write how-to articles related to technology, taking screenshots is something inevitable. And often times, you don’t want the screenshot to be used just the way it is. You want to censor certain image parts to protect the sensitive information, like an email address or username. You can do so with GIMP.

GIMP allows you to censor an image part by making it blur. Or, if you prefer to pixelate the part you want to censor, GIMP is also capable to do so. In this post, we will show you how to censor an image part using GIMP. We have the following image as an example. We will censor the facial part of the portrait below.

Step 1: Select the part you want to censor

First off, you need to select the image part you want to censor. GIMP has several selection tools which you can find on the Toolbox.

Select a selection tool according to your object (the part you want to censor). In this example, we will pixelate the eyes area of the portrait above and we use the Rectangle Select Tool to select the eyes area. So, activate the Rectangle Select Tool by clicking its icon on the Toolbox.

Select the area you want to pixelate.

Step 2: Apply the filter

After selecting the part you want to censor, you can go to Filters -> Blur. There are several blurry effects you can use to censor the selected part, including Pixelize. Since we want to pixelate the selected part, so select Pixelize.

The Pixelize dialog will appear. You can change the block value by clicking the arrow icons on each parameter.

You can instantly see the blurry effect since GIMP supports live preview (you can disable this option by unticking the Preview option on the dialog box if you want).

If you want to pixelate other parts, you can simply select the parts you want to pixelate using a selection tool as we have demonstrated on step one above. If you want to use the same filter, you can press Ctrl+F keys on the keyboard. This shortcut will rerun the last used filter using the same settings (more GIMP shortcuts).