A system and method for a blur brush performing adaptive bilateral filtering is disclosed. The method may include receiving user input selecting an area of an image to be filtered, such as by pointing to the image area using the blur brush. The selected image may comprise an edge and a plurality of pixels. The method may operate to the blur brush identifying the edge in the selected image area. The method may operate to apply a filter tool (e.g., a bilateral filter) to the selected image area, while preserving the edge. The methods may be implemented by program instructions executing in parallel on CPU(s) or GPUs.