Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to show you
how to remove text from a photo. This works really well
with photos that don't have a lot of variation in the background. If there's a lot of variation,
you'll have to use longer ways of doing it, like using the clone stamp and that kind of thing. All
right, let's get started. [Music]
All right, so I'm here in Photoshop, and I'm just going to go to open, and then I've got an
image right here that has some text over the top of it. I'll open that. Now, this is just
an ad I found online, but a good use of this would be something like you downloaded a photo
from a stock site and it has text on it that you don't want. This is an easy way to get rid of it.
So, I'm going to get my Lasso tool right over here. You can hit L on your keyboard too, and
I'm just going to select the text and get close to it, but you don't have to get right up next to it.
And then I'll switch to my M tool, which is the rectangular marquee, and hold shift and
get this one down here. Now I'll come up here to Select > Color Range. I'm going to click on Select
and choose the highlights. So you can see it's kind of isolating the text from the background.
We can adjust the fuzziness and range, so I'm going to bump the range up to kind of
knock out those background colors, but I also want to adjust the fuzziness a little bit.
Now, I still have a little bit of the background here, but that's okay. I'll go ahead and say OK.
So now we have the text selected for the most part. I'll come up here to Select and then choose
Modify, and we're going to expand the selection by, I'm thinking, three pixels, and I'll say OK.
Now I'm going to check out my Quick Mask. I'll hit Q on my keyboard,
and this shows us that everything that's red is selected. So you can see a little bit here
that we don't want selected, so I'm going to go ahead and erase that. I'll hit E on my keyboard,
and I'm holding CTRL and Option and then dragging to the right to make my brush bigger.
I want black to be in the front, so I'm going to hit X to switch those. And if you have different
colors here, you can just hit D on your keyboard to get white and black there. Then I can erase
those reddish areas back there. You're basically erasing the selection, so just be careful you
don't erase some of the selection here. Okay, and this looks pretty good. I'm going
to hit Q again to go out of Quick Mask mode, so now we have a pretty clean selection of our text.
I'm going to come up here to Edit > Content-Aware Fill.
It takes a second. You can see it did a pretty good job. We've got some artifacts here, and we've
got something down here. So I'm going to cancel. I'm going to go ahead and increase my selection,
so Select > Modify > Expand again. We'll go three more pixels, and now let's try it again:
Edit > Content-Aware Fill. And this got almost everything, so I'm pretty happy with this. We'll
say OK, and then I'll hit CMD+D or CTRL+D on a PC to deselect everything, and I'm going to zoom in.
You can see here that we have a little bit of work to do still, so I'm going to hit "J"
on my keyboard. "J" will bring me up here to the spot healing brush. I'm going to make
my brush a little smaller. On a Mac, that's "CTRL" + "Option" and then drag to the left.
I'm going to zoom in up here, and I'm just going to go over these areas that didn't work very well.
Okay, so now we have the background with no text on it. Now, I'm going to try another image, so
I'll go to File, Open, and this is another ad. I also got this one online, so it's really low res.
Now, because this is dark text on a light background, we're going to have to change
something in Select Color Range. But first, let's highlight our text, and this time, I'm going to
use a Quick Mask to do that. So I'll hit "Q" on my keyboard, then I'll hit "B." You'll want to
make sure black is in front here, and then just draw over the top of whatever you want to select.
I'm going to make my brush a little bit smaller.
I'm going to click and hold "Shift" to get that bottom text.
Now, I'll hit "Q" again to exit the Quick Mask and get our selection.
I'll come up here to Select Color Range. This time we'll select the shadows,
and I'm going to increase the range here until I start getting the text but not the background very
much. And this is definitely how it'll look with a low res image. It would be very pixelated, and
that's okay. We'll say OK, and now I'll hit "Q" to see if there's some extra stuff we can delete.
I'm going to make sure white is in front and get on my brush and just delete these little areas.
And I'll hit "Q" again to get my selection back. I'm going to go to Select, Modify, and Expand,
and we'll put three pixels. And I think this is good because if you zoom in, you can see this
pixely stuff. It'll help to get rid of that. Maybe we want to do it even a little more.
I'll go Select, Modify, and Expand, and this time I'm going to go two pixels. I'll zoom out
a little bit, and now the final step, Edit, Content-Aware Fill, and it did a really good
job this time of just getting rid of that text. We'll say OK and then CMD-D or CTRL-D to deselect.
Now, I want to show you one more example with a background that is pretty varied that it doesn't
work that well with. So, I'm going to drag this image onto my Photoshop icon, and here we have
a lot of variation with our background. With this one, I'm just going to use my rectangular marquee,
hold "Shift," and draw another box. I'll come up here to Select Color Range, and we want the
highlights on this one. Okay, and with this one, these settings are giving me
a really nice result, so I'll go ahead and say OK. I'll go to Select, Modify, Expand,
and we'll do two pixels and say OK. Next, we'll go to Edit, Content-Aware Fill, because we have
a hard edge up here. Photoshop doesn't know what to do with what's behind these letters,
and same here, it just doesn't really know what to do. So, I'm going to go ahead and say OK and
hit CMD + D or CTRL + D. And to fix this part, I'll probably just copy this area over here.
I'll get on my clone stamp tool and make my brush a little bit bigger, and I'll hold Option or Alt
and just click right along this edge, start from right here and clone this part to get rid of that.
So, when you have an image like this, you'll have to go back in and make some edits, because like
this part down here doesn't look good, this isn't right. And you might find that the content-aware
fill just isn't working for your image. In that case, you'll have to find other ways to make
it work. But I just wanted to show you what can happen when there's a lot of variation in detail
in the background. All right, I hope this video is useful for you. If you liked it and you want to
see more videos like this, just hit the subscribe button and the little bell next to it, and you'll
be notified every time a new video comes out. All right, I'll see you in the next video. Thank you!!