Remove handwriting from an image

Printed text is black toner or ink: dark and almost perfectly neutral. Ballpoint is not. Blue ballpoint is obviously blue, and black ballpoint is nearly always faintly blue or violet when you measure it. So a selection that takes dark pixels only when they carry some of that colour takes the pen and leaves the print — that is the keep printed text guard. Blue ink is a simpler window of hue and saturation.

What replaces the ink matters as much. Copying texture from elsewhere on a page puts fragments of other words where the handwriting was. The paper fill instead takes the brightest pixels near each ink stroke — the paper — and fills with their average, so a photographed page keeps its shading from one corner to the other and the cleaned area is just paper.

Do not alter certificates, mark sheets, identity documents or anything you will present as an original. This is for your own worksheets, notes and drafts.

1. 1Choose the ink. Blue ink, Black ink or Both, in the Similar colour panel. Leave Keep printed text ticked.
2. 2Check the selection. Zoom in. Anything printed that was taken — a coloured heading, a stamp — comes back with the restore brush.
3. 3Erase with Paper fill. It is selected here. The strokes become the local paper tone.
4. 4Look for crossings. Where pen crossed print, the print under the pen is replaced too, because the two cannot be separated there.
5. 5Save as PNG or high-quality JPG. PNG keeps text edges crisp; a JPG at quality 92 or more is fine for printing.

• Where handwriting crosses printed text in a similar colour, the two inks cannot be separated; the printed letters under the pen are lost.
• Pencil is grey and neutral, like print, so the guard keeps it. Select pencil with the similar-colour click instead.
• Coloured printing — a blue heading, a red stamp — can be taken as ink. Take it back with the restore brush.
• Indentations and shadows the pen left in the paper are not ink and stay.