How to apply blur to a UIView?

This should work. I commented in the code to help you understand what's going on:

//To take advantage of CIFilters, you have to import the Core Image framework#import <CoreImage/CoreImage.h>//Get a UIImage from the UIViewUIGraphicsBeginImageContext(myView.bounds.size);[myView.layer renderInContext:UIGraphicsGetCurrentContext()];UIImage *viewImage = UIGraphicsGetImageFromCurrentImageContext();UIGraphicsEndImageContext();//Blur the UIImage with a CIFilterCIImage *imageToBlur = [CIImage imageWithCGImage:viewImage.CGImage];    CIFilter *gaussianBlurFilter = [CIFilter filterWithName: @"CIGaussianBlur"]; [gaussianBlurFilter setValue:imageToBlur forKey: @"inputImage"]; [gaussianBlurFilter setValue:[NSNumber numberWithFloat: 10] forKey: @"inputRadius"];CIImage *resultImage = [gaussianBlurFilter valueForKey: @"outputImage"]; UIImage *endImage = [[UIImage alloc] initWithCIImage:resultImage];//Place the UIImage in a UIImageViewUIImageView *newView = [[UIImageView alloc] initWithFrame:self.view.bounds];newView.image = endImage;[self.view addSubview:newView];

If you have any questions about the code, just leave it in the comments.

Note: CIGaussianBlur isn't present on iOS as of 5.1, so you must find a different way to blur the view for devices 5.x+ (Thanks to @BradLarson for this tip). The accepted answer in this question looks promising as a replacement, as does this library.

Ever since the release of iOS 7, This question has been getting a lot of hits and I thought I should follow up on what I ended up doing.

I personally blurred the picture at the time with photoshop, but there are many great third party libraries available that do dynamic and static blurring, here are a couple:

• This ingenious library takes a layer from UITabBar and applies toany view to get iOS 7's native blur:https://github.com/JagCesar/iOS-blur/
• This library is a real time blurring library that live blurs any viewbelow it: https://github.com/alexdrone/ios-realtimeblur (as pointed out by qegal)
• Another one that does the same realtime blur:https://github.com/nicklockwood/FXBlurView
• This Library is the one I personally use and is Great, allowingyou to set the tint color among other settings:https://github.com/ivoleko/ILTranslucentView

I wanted to post this because you no longer need to take screenshots of individual frames or screen.

iOS 8: With the coming release of iOS 8, Apple has included a built in blurred UIView, UIVisualEffectView (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uivisualeffectview)

In iOS 8 you can use UIVisualEffectView to get blurred Views.See: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uivisualeffectview