Text Specific Remove Tool

Remove is a powerful tool when it comes to objects but it doesn’t do as well for text. Especially small print. If I am remastering an old magazine that was published pre-digital and all of the source material is lost to the ages, for example. Often, straight remove just takes surrounding pixels and fills in the space and this can often mangle any image detail that’s underneath the test. 

Imagine a sheet of lined paper with hand writing in pencil on it. If I were to take an eraser and erase the pencil, it erase the text revealing the white paper underneath. Well, the current remove tool in Photoshop will botch this concept up. So rather than erase the text and leave white page underneath, it’ll grab pixles from the blue lines as well and use those to remove the text. Especially when the text in question is a smaller object on the image. 

This problem is magnified when you text overlayed on a complex background. It often leaves obvious rectangular blocks where the original text could be or ruins fine detail of the image underneath. 

I think an AI tool that can OCR flattened text, understand how the characters exist in relation to the image and then erase said text cleanly would be a huge asset.