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….
It’s far from a perfect solution, but if you have Photoshop, you might try selecting the type rather than the background, then coloring the type white, inverting the selection, and coloring the background.
Using the magic wand tool with a high tolerance setting (45 maybe) and a non-contiguous selection setting, select the whitest area in one of the letters. This will simultaneously select all the color values in all the other letters.
With those areas selected, use the Grow menu option (Top menu > Select > Grow). This will select adjacent pixels that were not selected with the magic wand tool. You might need to perform this same process a few times.
Once you’re satisfied with the selection, you’ll need to smooth and anti-alias the letters’ ragged edges. (Top menu > Select > Modify > Smooth). You’ll need to experiment with the numbers in the smooth settings. I set it at five and ran it twice, but you’ll need to play around with it.
Use a white fill to color the letters.
Invert the selection to select the background. (Top menu > Inverse) Now that the background is selected, fill it with whatever background color you choose.
There are alternate ways to do this, but it’s unlikely you’ll get better results, although I didn’t try them.
If you are, or support, Evil - just use ai.
Who needs a healthy planet if we can isolate that font?
…
I’m so cynical in my old age.
Thank you Just B, i tried your method but still get poor results than yours ..
Photoshop is the best solution for it. There are lot’s of way to remove the noise from the text. But Most effect way is background removal. For the background remove use any tool or manually it can be done perfectly through the pen tool. After background remove use any color or expected color. I have done it roughly. I hope it will help you.
Another way is illustrator by vector.
Thanks
If it’s a font you don’t have access to, maybe look for other examples of the font that would be better quality (vector preferred). Then reassemble the thing letter by letter. I’ve done it before and it’s a PITA but it may be your best hope for a decent result.
They sent me some scans to see what could be done with them, but unfortunately they are not good scans to start with. The quality is far too low for proper reproduction.
Could you get something out of them? Yes, possibly. But for reproduction, even personal reproduction, the scan quality is not really high enough. One of them actually looks more like it was taken with a phone rather than scanned flat.
Because the artwork is on a black background, you could try pushing the contrast with Curves or Levels so the blacks become solid black and the light areas become as clean as possible. Then you could invert the image so the page becomes white and the text becomes black. That may give you a more usable starting point for cleaning or tracing.
But the main issue is the quality of the lettering. At this scan resolution, the letterforms are already too broken up and pixelated. You can improve the contrast, but you cannot recover detail that was never captured properly in the first place.
For a clean result, it would still need to be rescanned at a much higher optical resolution, or rebuilt/retyped from scratch.
I think the main issue is that it is someone’s handwriting, used for a specific purpose, not intended for public consumption. It’s a potential legal issue best avoided.
