Hi everyone. I’m having trouble placing a solid color behind this text, which is entirely pixelated. I use “Select > Color Range” and pick the color I want, but instead of a smooth, solid color, I end up with visible digital noise—it’s a rather poor-quality scan of a booklet. How can I get a result where the letters are crisp and clear, while the background color remains uniform and free of noise?
You can’t undo the effects on a printed brochure that you’ve scanned. You’ll need to recreate it from scratch or live with it as is with a minor tweak or two.
As @Just-B says, if it needs to be clean, it really has to be recreated.
The problem is that once the original artwork has been printed and then scanned, it is no longer clean type on a flat colour. It is now a raster image made up of pixels. The background will contain paper texture, scanner noise, print/halftone dots, compression artefacts, and small colour variations. The edges of the letters will also have mixed pixels from anti-aliasing and from the print/scan process.
So when you use Select > Color Range, Photoshop is not selecting “the background” as an object. It is only selecting a range of similar colour values. On a poor scan, those values are noisy and inconsistent, which is why you get speckling rather than a smooth solid fill.
If this has to go back to print, the best source scan would need to be as high-resolution as practically possible, preferably at true optical resolution. For text or line-art reproduction, I would normally be thinking in the region of 1200 ppi at final size, or even 2400 ppi for very fine detail. That is very different from a normal 300 ppi photo scan, because type and line art need much sharper edge information.
Even then, a better scan only gives you better pixels. It does not turn the scan back into live type or vector artwork. You can sometimes improve it by making a high-contrast mask with Levels/Curves or Threshold, then placing a new solid colour background underneath, but the result will still depend on the quality of the scan and the condition of the original print.
In the past I had to scan an entire book page by page and make minor edits by overlaying replacement text in Photoshop to cover words or short paragraphs. For that particular job it was cheaper than typesetting the whole book from scratch, but it was still a workaround rather than a proper rebuild.
If you can retype it, that will almost always give the better result: new solid background, new live text, and no scan noise.
Yes, I immediately wanted to retype the text, that would have been easier, but the problem is that this is a font that is not available to the public. It is a booklet for Eminem’s album The Eminem Show, where on the back page it is written that the font was made according to Eminem’s handwriting. Can’t find that font. Thank you for your answer. Do you perhaps have another suggestion, to at least improve it as much as possible if I can’t type the text anymore?
I’d need the original scan at the highest possible resolution.
If it’s in Eminem’s handwriting then you may have some copyright issues there unless you’re doing the work for Eminem or his music company/industry that have the rights to use it.
There are similar handwriting fonts out there.
I did say
Without the font, good luck on this….