Remove Text from a Photo — Pro, on our server
Type is a thin mask, and thin masks are the easy case. Inpainting works by continuing what surrounds the hole you punched, so the narrower the hole the more evidence there is on either side of it. Individual letters are a few dozen pixels wide with unbroken surface all around them, which is why lettering on a wall, a sky, a bonnet, a road or a defocused background usually vanishes with no visible trace at all. The comparison worth holding in your head is with a whole human figure, which leaves a gap wider than anything nearby can explain. Text sits at the other end of that scale, alongside power lines and scratches on a scan — the family of jobs this model is best at.
What breaks it is texture, not size. Set a sentence across a brick wall, a hedge, a tiled roof, a herringbone floor or a patterned dress and every letter becomes a small demand to continue a repeating structure through a gap. The model gets the colour and the grain right, and the alignment slightly wrong: mortar lines shift by a pixel or two, a leaf repeats, a stripe bends. At a normal viewing size this is invisible; at 100% on a large screen it is the thing a careful eye lands on. Judge the result at the size the picture will actually be seen, and if it must survive a full-resolution print, mask a little wider so the fill has more room to resolve the pattern.
Mask in blocks, not outlines, and take everything that came with the type. A drop shadow, a stroke, a semi-transparent bar behind a caption and the soft glow around a bright glyph are all part of what makes the text visible, and each is left untouched unless your brush covers it. The usual failure is a mask cut tight to the glyph: the anti-aliased pixels at the letter edge stay, and the result carries a faint embossed ghost of the word you removed. Sweep across the whole line in one or two strokes with a margin, then check the outcome; a second pass over one stubborn word is cheap in attention and gives the model a fresh, simpler problem. If what you really want is the text as data rather than gone, read it out first — MiniPx has an on-device image-to-text reader that never uploads anything.
Scope, privacy and cost, stated plainly. This page is about text in your own photographs; stripping an ownership mark from a picture somebody else made is not what it is for. Text removal is Cloud HD — Pro-only, opt-in, and it runs on our GPU because PowerPaint is far too heavy for a browser. The file and the mask are encrypted in transit, processed in the United States, deleted when the run finishes and in all cases within 24 hours, and never used to train anything. Pro gives you 150 runs a month on Monthly and 200 on Annual, of which 10 may be HD; every removal is HD. When the text is only part of a wider tidy-up, the photo clean-up page covers doing several removals in one considered pass, and the general object remover explains the same mechanism applied to anything that is not lettering.