: What's the most efficient way to "blank" old comic word balloons while retaining paper texture? I'm taking very old (1940s and '50s) comics and trying to remove the text from some of their

@Heady304

With Gimp comes a plugin Resynthesize together with a Python script Heal Selection. On Linux the plugin is contained in the package gimp-plugin-registry.

After selecting an area with the select tool:



We can "heal" this selection from "Filters > Enhance > Heal selection...". Here I made a random healing with 10 pixels from the surrounding:

Vote Up Vote Down

@Heady304

If you are feeling adventurous you can implement the Texture-Synthesis algorithm described here

it fills pixels with those which have a similar neighborhood creating an almost seamless extension of a texture or filling in holes, here are some examples

Gimp supports scripting, so you could write a plugin for this (I planned to do it myself a while ago but then got sidetracked. Your question reminded me about it again)

Vote Up Vote Down

@Ravi4787994

I would approach this in a similar way to horatio, but I would probably keep the original image in tact as much as possible (assuming you want to preserve it).

I'd create a similar texture to the paper like so:



It's just a noise texture against a subtle gradient with some distortions via a horizontal and vertical scale.

You'll notice some color variations that I applied using the Burn and Dodge tools to help it blend in to the existing artwork since the color is not uniform across the whole comic.

I used a Clipping Mask with very soft edges around the text removed to produce this result:



I used Photoshop to do this, but the same principles should apply in GIMP.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Cofer715

Because you are editing out text (e.g. radically altering the original), one way to do this is to cheat:

Edit the image so that the yellowed paper is no longer yellowed. Blank out to your heart's content, then overlay a new all-over fake yellowing paper effect. This will be uniform.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Sims5801359

The copy and paste will give best results without ruining the texture and color of that particular balloon. What I generally do is start fairly small copy paste a few times, then merge the layers together (does Seashore have layers?) but stop just before the original. Then you have a larger sample to continue working with. Before you continue copying and pasting that layer soften the edge and that will fix the weird results you're having. I just use a large soft eraser. Then resume copying and pasting it, flattening as needed, and softening as needed.

Depending on the comic you could probably get away with making it oversized by a fair bit and then using the same 'cover layer' for all balloons. Just get the good empty sample, drop it on top, and then remove the excess for that particular spot.

Of course if Seashore doesn't have layers I would say to get Gimp.

Vote Up Vote Down