Pull the text out of an image — as text you can actually edit

Three different jobs hide in this search

Copy the words out (any OCR site does that), delete the text from the photo (inpainting tools do that), or the hard one: recover the text AS TEXT — editable type layers sitting over a clean background, so you can fix a typo on a poster or translate a graphic without rebuilding it. Only the third gives you a working file, and it needs OCR, inpainting, and a PSD writer working together.

How Layersmith does it

Detect text (free) runs OCR in your browser — three passes, tuned separately for body text and large display type — and boxes every line it finds. Then choose: Lift text only (free) creates the editable text layers and leaves the image untouched, or Lift + erase (2 credits) also removes the original pixels with one server inpainting pass, reconstructing the background behind them. The exported PSD contains genuine type objects — click one in Photoshop or Photopea and retype it.

The gauntlet: a 4K perfume ad, de-texted

A 2160×3840 finished ad — metallic gold display type with glow, six sizes of copy, a busy floral background and water reflections. Detect text found the copy and one click lifted it to editable layers while the server fill rebuilt the background behind every line — glow, drop shadows and all. The boxed badge and flourishes (artwork, not type — OCR correctly ignores them) came off with a lasso + Fill behind in the same editor; the monogram stays as the brand mark. Below is the actual editor state and the clean 4K result.

Where it shines, and its honest limits

Best on clear, roughly horizontal text with decent contrast: posters, flyers, screenshots, memes, product labels. Font matching is not attempted — recovered text arrives in a clean default face for you to restyle, because guessing fonts badly is worse than not guessing. Heavily stylized, warped, or hand-lettered type may need the manual tools instead — as the boxed badge above shows, they finish the job in seconds.

Nobody else hands you type objects

Tools that "remove text" give you the background only. Tools that "extract text" give you a .txt file. The combination — editable type layers over an AI-cleaned background, in one PSD — is, as far as we can find, unique to Layersmith. We are not going to characterise what anyone else's "text layers" actually contain, because from the outside we cannot see it. What we can tell you is how to check in one click, on their file or ours: open the PSD, click the text layer, and see whether you get a cursor or a picture of words.