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View Full Version : Automated tool for removing time stamps?

sswift
12-18-2005, 08:46 PM
I took a bunch of photos at my sister's wedding, and unbeknownst to me, my dad had enabled time stamping on the digital camera I used. I've got around 280 photos with time stamps on them now, and I need a way to remove them.

Does anyone know of an app that can do this, and will remove them in such a way that it's difficult to tell they were there in the first place? I know this is possible, because I have read research papers on algorithms which can fill in missing portions of images with something that looks right.

I need to get this done before christmas!
sswift
12-20-2005, 08:33 AM
I found an app which could do the job, but it's experimental and claims to take an hour for a single image. The samples looked pretty good, but the time to calculate the result was totally unacceptable.

So I looked for a solution which I could implement in a batch process in Photoshop, and I found one which works pretty well.

All you need to do is make an action that contains the following:

Select by color, use eyedropper to pick color of text you want removed. (In my case it is yellow, so this works well) Set fuzziness to 64.

Expand selection by 2 pixels.

Fill selection with black.

Do Median filter with radius of 16, five times.

Save

And that's it. Doing the median filter five times fills in the area fairly well. On most images unless you look close you won't notice that the area is blurry. For what I need the images for, this is acceptable, and you can't beat saving hours manually painting all that text out on 200 images.

You'll probably need to adjust the median radius depending on the resolution of your image. You may also need to adjust the number of passes. Five was determined by experimentation.

I'm positive I could write an application which does a better job than this cheap Photoshop method, (and faster too) using some techniques I use in my Seamless Texture Generator, but I didn't have time to write such an app before christmas, and such an app probably wouldn't have a very large user base, so there'd be no point in writing it to sell.
NickJushchyshyn
12-20-2005, 02:56 PM
Actually, if you handled the photos as an image sequence, you could probably work out a comp in something like AE or Shake that could isolate the timestamps, key in a blur or pixel-copy based replacement and then render to a new set of images.

Just a thought.
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12-20-2005, 02:56 PM
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