Pulling written text from scanned notes?

[TheTechMokey]

I have a lot of notes written in notebooks and I want to pull the text from these notebooks and remove the notebook background so I can put these hand written notes as PNG format into an app such as obsidian so it can be manipulated by css.

When I try to use AI to remove the notebook papaer by removing backgrounds, it only removes the background behind the notebook and not the notebook paper itself.
The goal is to extract only the text from the notebook as an image.

I'm a novice to PS and searching only led me down how to manipulate documents. Which isn't really what I'm looking for.

Please go easy on me, I'm very new to photoshop.

[TheTechMokey]

I guess you can't edit posts?
Anyways, the question is, how do I go about doing this? I don't need hand holding, if someone could get me pointed in the right direction, I'd greatly appreciate it.

[Jeff Arola]

If your able to post an example, that would help us suggest the best course of action.

[TheTechMokey]

This is an example page I pulled from online (waiting for my scanner to come in)
But I am trying to just remove the paper and leave a transparent background to be able to do what I can do with my notes currently (video provided for end goal)

Adobe "remove background"

End Goal

[Conrad_C · Accepted solution]

The Remove Background feature is trained on typical subject + background photo scenes (“ok that’s a person with buildings behind them, I’ll keep the person”), and probably isn’t trained on this type of non-photographic scan and doesn’t really know what to do.

For this, it might be better to forget about automated/machine-learning methods, and instead use more traditional ways that can select by tone or color.

One way is to use the Blend If sliders in Layer Options:

1. In the Layers panel, double-click a non-Background layer (not the layer name). Double-clicking is a shortcut for choosing the command Layer > Layer Style > Blending Options. In there, the Blend If options drop out pixels based on tonal level, so this technique depends on the background being a distinctly lighter or darker tone than the text or line art you want to isolate.

2. In the Blend If section, for the Current Layer option, drag its white point slider to the left until the background is transparent. This is a threshold value.

3. If the break is too harsh, Alt-drag (Windows) or Option-drag (macOS) the slider to split it; this feathers the transition.

The blue color in the demo below is a Solid Fill Color layer that I added so you can more easily see that the background has been dropped out, even though the checkerboard already indicates transparency.

You then export in a format such as PNG that supports an alpha channel to preserve the transparency.

[TheTechMokey]

Thank you very much!

[emmadu4]

Thanks for this—is there a way to actually separate the darker sections (the words in this case) out onto their own layer so I can manipulate them further?

[emmadu4]

Never mind, merging down into an empty layer did the trick!