John -
I' m really curious how you extracted the image. Tried a few things but none worked, ie blending modes, magic eraser, etc.
Can you provide some insight into your process? Thanks!
- Jeff
Sure
@JeffK
It took a bit of iteration yet I'll walk you through the Layer Stack.
First step is to crop the image to only work on the sticker on the car.
Then I added a Threshold Adjustment Layer and played with the slider to get a decent B&W image. Note that I added and Invert Adjustment Layer to have the Objects Black and the Background White:
This only gets you close so then I added above the image and below the Threshold Layer a pixel Layer Initially set to 50% gray and the Blend set to Soft Light as shown in the image below. Note 50% gray with Soft Light Blend does nothing yet you can paint with a lower opacity brush in white to Dodge the image (make lighter) or again a low opacity brush in black to Burn the Image (make darker). What this does is locally change the Threshold point between B&W. Later on to make the E and B more readable I painted in this Layer to force the E and B to be more distinct:
To also make the letters more distinct I turned the Image Layer to a Smart Object and added a little bit of Guassian Blur and here is the resulting image:
Now its looking a lot cleaner.
From here I brought it into Adobe Illustrator to do a vector trace as with the settings in the image below:
This created both clean edges and a vector form and could use as the final result if that were desired. I exported to PNG with the width set to 5000px and posted the result.
Many different ways to tune up the image to taste with the above steps and just stopped when it looked good to me.
Note that I just made this up on the fly and not a specific technique. I am sure there are many ways to approach this type of problem.
If there are any more questions just ask
John Wheeler