Welcome to the Treehouse Community

Want to collaborate on code errors? Have bugs you need feedback on? Looking for an extra set of eyes on your latest project? Get support with fellow developers, designers, and programmers of all backgrounds and skill levels here with the Treehouse Community! While you're at it, check out some resources Treehouse students have shared here.

Looking to learn something new?

Treehouse offers a seven day free trial for new students. Get access to thousands of hours of content and join thousands of Treehouse students and alumni in the community today.

Start your free trial

General Discussion

Sholom Lesches
Sholom Lesches
4,222 Points

Remove text from an image

Any way to completely remove text from a JPEG image suing Illustrator?

2 Answers

Julian Gutierrez
Julian Gutierrez
19,201 Points

If the background is simple enough or a similar pattern such as grass and the text isn't too large you can clone it out in Photoshop using the clone stamp tool or content aware fill.

Sholom Lesches
Sholom Lesches
4,222 Points

Thank you!

The background is rather complex and the text pretty long. I forgot to mention n my original question that I'm usin Illustrator.

Hi Sholom,

I would use the word "extract" rather than "remove", but either way you are probably going to want to look at the algorithms involved in OCR (Optical Character Recognition):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition

There are whole books written on this (more info then I could ever give in a Treehouse forum post).

This book alone is over 360 pages:

http://www.amazon.com/Character-Recognition-Systems-Students-Practitioners/dp/0471415707

Here's the pdf version:

http://people.mokk.bme.hu/~kornai/OCR/Irodalom/Cheriet_Character_Recognition_Systems__A_Guide_for_Students_and_Practitioners.pdf

To advise you further I would have to know which programming language (or pre-compiled OCR software/library) you are planning to use..

I personally use the ABBY OCR software that came with my scanner.

I think there is a free shareware version:

http://downloads.tomsguide.com/ABBYY-FineReader,0301-39472.html