Sharpening Scanned Letters

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
March 15, 2024
3 replies
1206 views

I scanned text from a negative of a vintage truck trailer, and the outline is wavy because the walls of the truck were ribbed and the image was slightly out of focus. I am trying to straighten out the edges of the text. My question is, is there an object in photoshop that functions like masking tape while painting? Where painting up to the object with the brush tool would create a crisp, straight line? And then the object could be removed?

Photoshop CS6 WIN 10 Thanks Joe

Windows

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Trevor.Dennis

Community Expert

You shouldn't be thinking in terms of sharpening, or cleaning up the raster image text. Recreate the text using a Type layer matching the font, and using Free Transform to match perspective etc. Blank the original, and it's job done. If the result is too clean to look real, then distress the text to suit the image.

I see you are using CS6. You would not believe the difference between that and current versions. The beta version of Illustrator can scan text in an image. Match the font, and perspective, and change it to live text. Even without using Photoshop, Illustrator or other image apps, there are any number of apps that can do OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and turn raster text to live text. Acrobat being an obvious example.

If you want more help, show us a full res version of the entire image, and describe what you would like to achieve, and you'll get lots of help. That's 100% certainty, because we love doing shite like that. 🙂

Trevor.Dennis

Community Expert

A wee tip about add a graphic to the side of a truck when it is not square to the camera axis like below.

If it is text then create the text layer, and make it a Smart Object.

Double click to open the SO in a new window, and add some canvas.

Save the edited SO and go back to the original image.

Now use Free Transform, and Ctrl drag the corner points to fit the corner of the truck side.

Because the layer is an SO you can do this as many times as you need, and the corner handles will always remain in their original position.

This is what happens if you don't use a Smart Object. You can see that it would be difficult matching this to the image perspective.

D Fosse

Community Expert

Selections are your masking tape. Draw a selection and paint inside it. Or outside it by inverting the selection. Or lift the whole thing out. These are all core Photoshop functions.

But honestly, this looks like something I would recreate as vector art, using the Pen tool. You can do that in Photoshop, although ideally in Illustrator. Depends on how much work you want to put into it.

Bojan Živković11378569

Community Expert

I'm not certain what you're asking initially. Have you attempted using Quick Mask mode? You can enter and exit it by pressing the letter Q. Utilize a hard brush.

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