Remove text from a screenshot

Interface backgrounds are not texture. A chat bubble is one colour, a header is a gradient, a slide is white. Fill them by copying patches and you get faint blotches that never existed — invisible on a photograph, obvious on a flat grey bar. The flat fill instead fits a plane — a solid colour, or a colour changing evenly in one direction — to the ring of pixels just outside the box, and fills the box with it.

Before it fills, it measures how well the ring fits: if the rim differs from a plane by more than seven levels on average, the background is a photograph or a pattern, and a flat patch would show. Then it refuses, the edge march fills the box instead, and the record says which ran and why. The export defaults to PNG, because JPEG's blocks ring around sharp UI edges.

Do not alter screenshots of conversations, payments, results or records that you will show to anyone as genuine. Cover what must be hidden with the photo redactor instead.

1. 1Paste or open the screenshot. Ctrl V pastes straight from the clipboard.
2. 2Box the text. Draw the rectangle over the words with a few pixels of margin inside the background they sit on.
3. 3Erase. The flat fill fits the background from the box's edge and fills it.
4. 4If it refused. The record says the edge was textured and the edge march filled it. That is right for text over a photo or a pattern.
5. 5Save as PNG. Selected already. The file has the screenshot's exact dimensions.

• Text over a photo, a pattern or a blurred backdrop is not on a flat background. The flat fill refuses there; the edge march or the patch search does the work.
• A box that straddles two UI areas — a button and the bar under it — fits neither. Box each area separately.
• Radial gradients and drop shadows are approximated by a straight gradient.
• Changing a screenshot that will be shown as a record is not a fill problem. Use a cover.