Past clients have sometimes say this is the only image they have from the previous design team. Unfortunately, there are words on top of this image. Although removing text for a client does raise a few flags for me? If the company indeed bought an image from a stock library such as Getty Images, or iStockPhoto, then they should have a record for you to re-download. Or they may say it was a royalty-free image. OK, so do a Google search to confirm that. In the end, the client may be adamant that you use this image. To protect yourself, always have an email trail stating that the client does want to use this image, even though it may be protected under copyright law.
Note: Always make a duplicate copy when working with images—just in case you make a mistake, one can always go back to the original images.
Steps in removing text from an image:
- Open the image with the text
- Use the magic wand tool to select the text. Hold the Shift key to add to your selection.
- Depending on the colour, you could select similar colours. Before doing so, do lower the tolerance in the control panel. The higher the number, the more of a selection it will choose. The lower the tolerance, the less it will accept. But, if this colour is showing up elsewhere, you should be subtracting this from the selection.
- It may do a respectable job but doesn’t grab all the text that you want. Try using expand the selection. Go to Select > Expand > Enter a number of pixels. Sometimes 3 pixels work well, or even 5 pixels. It does depend on the type. Click OK when done
- A new dialogue box will open
Content-Aware Fill
Content-aware fill was designed to make removing unwanted objects or distracting elements from your photos as easy as possible. So what we did was made a selection around an area, in this case, the text.
Go to Edit > Content-Aware Fill. Photoshop will open another screen. One the left side, there would be a green overlay, which shows where the text is sampling from the image. As you will notice, on the right side is where the content used to be.
Granted, your selection may not have grabbed everything. I like to use the Expand tool again in the control panel and expand the selection one pixel at a time. Again, Photoshop will analyze the sample area of the image and replace it accordingly.
Content-Aware Fill Dialog Box
My colour overlay is green, and yours may be a different colour. You can also change your colour overlay too. Just remember the left side is the sampling image.
- Color Adaption, to me, is contrast. Contrast is strikingly different from something else. An example of contrast is tall and short; extra large coffee vs. small coffee.
- Rotation Adaption: One can rotate the adaption magically fill in missing parts to the background of a rotated image
- Output to: Current Layer, New Layer, Duplicate Layer. I like to use New Layer so I can flip it back and forth to compare.
Say OK when ready. Now, you should have an image with its text removed!
When you go back into the image, the selection edges are shown. To hide the edges go to View > Show > Selection Edges. You can also deselect the selection by Command/Control D. Which is the deselect keyboard shortcut.
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