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I'll note outright that I'm new to Photoshop and that this may be a bigger question than I realize, but I appreciate any guidance.

I've taken a scan of a water-damaged dust jacket for a book which I would ultimately like to recreate. I chopped it up, straightened it, and used the Spot Fix tool to fill in losses and create a 'complete' image. Here's my progress:

enter image description here

enter image description here

At this point, I'd like to either 'extrapolate' that lovely blue color from the flaps to the rest of the image that can be printed onto appropriate white paper, and/or remove the background entirely so that the text can be printed onto equitable blue paper.

I've taken a look at some answers here about the Magic Wand tool, but this text is so fine that I'm having trouble cleaning it up. Is there a better way to go about 'extracting' this text to its own layer?

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    In all honesty, it'll be half the work or less to simply retype everything in a new document. And then manually redraw the illustration. There's nothing about the scan which precludes simple recreation as opposed to trying to correct.
    – Scott
    Apr 24, 2019 at 22:18
  • Fair enough, thank you. In the spirit of learning the tool, I would still like to correct this one so that I have an idea of how to go about it for a project that might be less viable for recreation. Apr 24, 2019 at 22:42
  • Rather ironically, the blurb on the inside front says the book suggests ways to recreate covers on old books whose covers are worn... I bet they never mentioned Photoshop ;)
    – Tetsujin
    Apr 25, 2019 at 6:47

2 Answers 2

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I’d turn the image into grey (using a saturation correction) then use a levels correction to clip all background colors to white and the text to black. Then you can add a fresh background color with a solid color layer in multiply blend mode.

Might not work around the darkest molds. I expect that area will need some more manual touch up. But at least this can get you 80% there in 5 minutes.

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Recreate the cover. If you have InDesign or other page layout software, you can in theory typeset quite exact copy.

BTW. No need to redraw the cover image, copy it from the book. Nearly the same is there in a big size. The next image is taken from an ad:

enter image description here

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