Image Editing for Dummies

I’m wondering if there is an easy way/tool to to change some text in an image file (a .jpg for instance), while keeping the rest of the image more or less intact? In particular I wanted to change the caption on that goofy ‘Cheer up Friend’ image that I think pops up occasionally on Qt3.

I’ve always been slightly mystified about how image editing and graphic design actually work, so maybe this is a dumb question.

The tough part is getting rid of the old text, which can be really difficult even for Photoshop pros depending on where it’s placed and how much it covers. You’d be best off finding the original source image and overlaying new text on it.

(And for the latter part, just create a new ‘layer’, slap the text down in there, and then you can move it around, resize it, and otherwise muck about with it without worrying about messing up the base image. Then when you’re ready there’ll be a function somewhere to ‘flatten’ the layers into a single image again and you save that.

You can’t just go in there and edit text like it was a word processor. Basically the way this is normally done is to go in, edit the picture to remove the existing text using various pixel-modification techniques like cloning so that it looks like there never was any text and then write new text over the image using the font rendering technology in your image editor. How difficult this is to do depends a lot on the source image, and I have no idea what cheer up friend picture you’re talking about.

For finding the original image, you might want to use something like this TinEye image search: http://tineye.com/login

The image I am talking about is here:

http://cid-602dd2a971d43405.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/CheerUp/CheerUp.jpg?lc=1033

I guess if Im understanding you guys correctly its tricky (or impossible, depending on the image) to do and you probably need to be good at photoshop.

So I’m going to chalk this one up as not worth the effort, since MS Paint is the only image tool Ive ever used to any extent.

Thanks for the tips though.

Edit: Bah, CCZ did it better. :P

If you just want the original image without any of the edited stuff, it’s here. (GIS found a cropped version, and then used that in TinEye to find the bigger original.)

If you just want the text removed, this is about the best I can do:

(done by rescaling the original to the same size, pasting it into another layer, and then ‘erasing’ over the text on the original layer to turn it transparent)

Bravo Fugitive! I hope they never catch you.

Similar thing to what I just did, I TinEye’d my own cropped version though (just took the image he posted and cropped it and TinEye found that, figured the text was probably added at the same time as the clipart based on the theme and TinEye was getting confused by all the noise). And I also just layered and erased, but then I fixed up the erased bits by blitting similar sections on top (mirroring them in the case of the sundae cup base) and clone fixing the results a bit

Here’s my version. It isn’t perfect, but it is the best you get for free when you’re a random internet person:

You should be able to load this into any image editor and easily put new text on it as described in a previous post.

Holy cow that’s great!

Thanks!

Both CCZ and Fugitive!

Wow, TinEye is pretty cool. I never heard of it before.

My god, it’s full of glurge.

Yeah. I was wondering when something like that would become available.

Bumping an old thread to plug an existing product just because it’s a pretty good overview (despite it being PCMag and not really “news”). Paint.NET review: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2370018,00.asp