Remove date from digital photos???

Cucullan

As it says above is there any way to remove the date from digital photos??

DonkeyStyle \o/

Like if it's stamped in the corner of the image already and you want to edit them out?

Yeah, you could use parts of the image around the date stamp to approximately rebuild the area covered by the date stamp.
As far as I'm aware, there's no way to get the real detail back, so you just have to fake it. (the exception may be if they're still on your camera and you have an option to turn them off, but that seems like a long shot)

You could try the clone tool at a low opacity and gradually graft over it... create a feathered selection around the date stamp and work on that exclusively, then work on blending the selection into the rest of the photo if nesessary.
Of course it's going to be a pain in the arse to do if there's a lot of complex detail under the date stamp, or if you've got hundreds of photos to do.
I don't know of any plugins that try to remove these, but then I haven't looked.

Another option might be to use the 'heal' tool, but I don't have that version of photoshop, so I couldn't tell ya.

A more sledge-hammer approach would be to just crop that area of the image out completely... which is definitely something you can do for hundreds of photos at a time automatically. (thumbs-plus is really good for batch operations)

Maybe you could post up an example of the date stamp, like a small crop of that area, so you might get more specific suggestions.

Cucullan

Here's the pic i'm trying to take the date out of

jhegarty

here is a really quick clone job done in gimp

DonkeyStyle \o/

Here's another quick one with steps included...

Start with a 'magic wand'/automatic selection and select the yellow part of each letter... using what ever feather value you need to make the selection encompass the black outline on the text.


Clone the grass from the outside of the selection into the selected area.


You might be left with a lot of dodgy-looking repeats like this...


So increase the size and opacity of your clone brush and go over the effected areas until it looks less noticable...


It's not perfect, since some areas are still a little blurry looking and the light looks slightly wrong... this is why you want to increase the opacity of your clone brush towards the end, so you get more detail... but you have to balance that with keeping the whole transition smooth and seamless, so don't go too hard.
Ideally you could use other photos (taken of the same thing) you could clone some grass from.
Really depends on how much time you want to spend on it, versus the quality you need... I'd say the one I've done there would pass the at-a-glance test... it wouldn't jump out at you as an edit (at least not in the context of the full picture), but if you looked closely at it, you'd probably think something looks a bit weird about it.
But you can improve it with tweaking.

Hank_Scorpio

That's a terrible job by Donkey Style, no offence, and I know you said it was unfinished, but it doesn't take long to do properly, so you could have done it better, I think.

DonkeyStyle \o/

Hank_Scorpio wrote: »

That's a terrible job by Donkey Style, no offence, and I know you said it was unfinished, but it doesn't take long to do properly, so you could have done it better, I think.

Looking at it again, yeah, it's quite bad.
My goal was to help the OP figure out how to do it on his own... not to do the job for him. (hence all the text and step-by-step pictures) So I didn't think the end result picture would matter in any real way.

You did a great job, feel free to give us both pointers.

[Edit]
Here's a slight upgrade on my old one.

Actually what I find now, is it's as handy to throw away the clone brush and copy/paste large feathered selections of the grass as new layers then selectively erase parts of them... there's far less broken continuity to hide.

Hank_Scorpio

You clone out the date.

This leaves blurry repeated data, as there's quite a small selection to choose from.

So what you need is random data.

So I use the patch tool and the healing tool.

In my fix of the photo, I used the patch tool to select grass from the rear of the photo and to place into the front of the photo.

The patch tool will take a copy of what you've selected and paste it where you want, but it will take the colour from the pixels around where you're placing the new data, not from where you took the data.

Doing this gives random data.

Gordon

Hank_Scorpio wrote: »

That's a terrible job by Donkey Style, no offence, and I know you said it was unfinished, but it doesn't take long to do properly, so you could have done it better, I think.

That was a terrible attempt at actually teaching the OP how you did that.

No need to be smart and condescending Hank.

Hank_Scorpio

Gordon wrote: »

That was a terrible attempt at actually teaching the OP how you did that.

No need to be smart and condescending Hank.

Well, I wasn't being smart or condescending. I simply didn't want the OP to think that what Donkeystyle did was a good effort, because it wasn't. And it doesn't take long to finish off something like that properly. So in the interest of being fair to the OP, I posted the image and how I did.

The way I have stated to do it is right.

I'll try to simplify.

Set the clone stamp to a radius of 85 px and 25% hardness (select the clone stamp, right click or cmd click (mac) anywhere on the pictuer to adjust the size and hardness).

Alt click on a piece of grass on the left hand side. This picks up a sample of the grass. Then using the left mouse button, start erasing the text, you will need to release the mouse button every now and then, you'll get the hang of it.

Once all the grass is cloned over the type you select the patch tool

With this tool you select parts of the image where the date was, don't do a big chunk, do small pieces of where you just cloned. Draw a marquee around small areas, then click and drag inside the marquee to an area of grass that wasn't cloned.

Randomly repeat this process by selecting different areas that you cloned originally and randomly select pieces of grass that need to look like they weren't cloned.

If when you're finished there are elements that look too repetetive, use the clone tool again to randomly remove pieces that look too similar.

That's it really.

DonkeyStyle \o/

Hank_Scorpio wrote: »

So in the interest of being fair to the OP, I posted the image and how I did.

Well in fairness, your first post was more along the lines of that's shít, shame on you, here's mine, k bye.
But we got there in the end. :pac:

Hank_Scorpio

Well, we did get there in the end. I always intended to come back and say how I did it, but pressed for time and things like that.