Less Blur with `Visual Effect View with Blur`?

The reason you're getting heavy blur is that the blur effect style affects the brightness level of the image, not the amount of blur applied.

Unfortunately, although Apple clearly has the ability to control the amount of blur applied programmatically--try dragging down slowly on the launchpad to watch the Spotlight blurring transition--I don't see any public API to pass a blur amount to UIBlurEffect.

This post claims that adjusting the background color alpha will drive the blur amount. It's worth a try, but I don't see where that is documented: How to fade a UIVisualEffectView and/or UIBlurEffect in and out?

It's a pity that Apple did not provide any options for blur effect. But this workaround worked for me - animating the blur effect and pausing it before completion.

func blurEffectView(enable enable: Bool) {
    let enabled = self.blurView.effect != nil
    guard enable != enabled else { return }

    switch enable {
    case true:
        let blurEffect = UIBlurEffect(style: .ExtraLight)
        UIView.animateWithDuration(1.5) {
            self.blurView.effect = blurEffect
        }

        self.blurView.pauseAnimation(delay: 0.3)
    case false:
        self.blurView.resumeAnimation()

        UIView.animateWithDuration(0.1) {
            self.blurView.effect = nil
        }
    }
}

and the UIView extensions for pausing (with a delay) and resuming view's animation

extension UIView {

    public func pauseAnimation(delay delay: Double) {
        let time = delay + CFAbsoluteTimeGetCurrent()
        let timer = CFRunLoopTimerCreateWithHandler(kCFAllocatorDefault, time, 0, 0, 0, { timer in
            let layer = self.layer
            let pausedTime = layer.convertTime(CACurrentMediaTime(), fromLayer: nil)
            layer.speed = 0.0
            layer.timeOffset = pausedTime
        })
        CFRunLoopAddTimer(CFRunLoopGetCurrent(), timer, kCFRunLoopCommonModes)
    }

    public func resumeAnimation() {
        let pausedTime  = layer.timeOffset

        layer.speed = 1.0
        layer.timeOffset = 0.0
        layer.beginTime = layer.convertTime(CACurrentMediaTime(), fromLayer: nil) - pausedTime
    }
}