Hand lettering scanned as an RGB TIFF, I'm trying to isolate the letters from the background.
My method for getting the text separate from the background follows these steps, except I forgot to get my artist to scan in grayscale, so starting in RGB mode:
- Manipulate levels to get pixels easily separable into black-and-white
- Select all > copy
- Create new alpha channel
- Paste into the new alpha channel
- Load Selection > channel: alpha channel > "invert" ticked > New selection
- Fill selection with black
Looks good, got the black separated from the white, but there are artifact-y looking pixels around the 5 that I can't seem to get rid of. If I add a stroke via the Layer Style menu, the artifacts catch the stroke and it looks awful:
The artifacts are mostly transparent and I can't figure out a way to select them so I can remove them, or do the reverse and just grab the black; the artifacts don't even show up in the selection when I command + click on the layer thumbnail:
Any suggestions for how to get rid of these artifact-pixels and just keep the black when starting from an RGB TIFF?