If you have a very beautiful photograph or image, but includes a text or a watermark, you can easily remove it with the help of Photoshop. Be careful, we are not talking about the classic trick of using the clone buffer, but about a much more technical solution that will give us a much more satisfactory result.
Before you start, remember that if you need to remove text overlay on a photo but you don’t have Photoshop, you can also use an Artificial Intelligence tool like DALL-E. The process is much simpler and the truth is that it works reasonably well. Take a look at THIS OTHER POST to see all the details.
How to Erase Text from a Photo Using Photoshop
For this tutorial we have used version 21 of Photoshop, which is one of the most recent. If you have a more up-to-date or slightly older version, some menus may show up elsewhere, but you shouldn’t have too much trouble going through the whole process.
- Open Photoshop and load the image.
- Create a copy of the image. To do this, go to the “Layers” panel, select the image layer, right click and click on “Duplicate layer”. Note: If you don’t see the layers panel go to the top menu and click on “Window -> Layers”.
- In the tools panel on the left, select the lasso tool.
- Without releasing the mouse, make a manual selection so that it surrounds all the text you want to remove.
- In Photoshop’s top menu, go to “Selection -> Color range”. This will open a new window where you can adjust the tolerance, in case the text cannot be correctly differentiated from the rest of the image. If you need help, click on the color selection pipette and click on the text to make the selection as close as possible.
- Once the text appears correctly highlighted in white on black, press “Okay” to close the window.
- You should now see the selection pick up all the correctly delimited letters of the text in detail.
- The next step is to expand the selection. This will allow us to erase the text completely without leaving unwanted traces. In the top menu, go to “Selection -> Modify -> Expand”
- Choose “Expand: 4 pixels” and press “Okay”. You will see that now the text selection is longer and includes all the pixels that were left out of the first selection.
- In the top menu, go to “Edit -> Content-Aware Padding”. You will see that the image turns green in some areas. Erases all green areas except around the text.
- In the “Content-Aware Fill” options menu that you will see on the right side of Photoshop, select “Color adaptation: Very high”. Make sure that the option “Send To: New Layer” is activated and press “Ok”.
- Go back to the layers window and you will see that there are now 3 layers: “Background” (the original photo), “Copy Background” (the copy of the original photo) and “Copy Background 2” (the copy of the copy). To end the process, simply hides the visibility of “Background copy” clicking on the eye-shaped icon that appears next to the layer.
- As you can see, the text has disappeared.
- Finally, press the Ctrl + D keys to undo the text selection. Goal achieved!
As you can see the result is simply perfect.