Converting shades of grey to white for a bump map in photoshop

Question

I have a grey scale image with different shades of grey (it's not this image, but it's the general idea, this is from Wikipedia as an example).

I want to use this as a texture in a game engine eg unity, unreal, etc.

And I want a pure black and white version that can be used as bump/displacement map.

So I want the head and the Liberty (and other text) text to be pure white on a black background. I selected the head with the magnetic lasso tool and put that into a different layer and used the bucket paint tool with white to fill the head in (there is probably a better way to do this but wasn't sure).

But i'm struggling with the liberty text. I have selected that and it is also in a separate layer, but can't use the bucket tool to make each letter white obviously. I tried changing the levels but it remains grey.

Was after some advice.

Thanks

Answer 1

Here's one possible method.

1. Invert the image.

2. Paint over everything you don't need in black.

3. With a small brush set to white draw around the parts of the letters and top of the head where the outline is missing or indistinct.

3. Select the black areas with the magic wand, invert the selection and fill white.

Answer 2

If you Ctrl+Click the image icon of a layer in the layers panel you select every non-transparent pixel in that layer. You can fill, paint or adjust with curves that exact selection content in any layer selected in the layers panel. The edited layer can be other than which was used to make the selection. An example:

I have this not-so-good-taste multilayer image. It has effects.

• insert a new empty layer
• hold the Ctrl-key and click the image icon in layer Property in the layers panel to generate a selection marquee along the border of the non-transparent area
• select the new layer in the layers panel, the marquee stays
• fill the selection with white

The result:

Nothing is changed below the new layer.

BTW the said process above works as well with text layers and bitmap layers. It's 100% useless if the shapes are not limited by sharp transparency borders. In that case you can try tresholding or making a selection manually, but the result is unpredictable beforehand. It's impossible to recommend any manual selection making tool without having your image.

Answer 3

Depends on the source image, with this image, I would simply go with the magic wand and some manual clean up thinkering, takes only a few minutes to achive this: