Five long answers

The instrument is on the front page and takes about a second to understand. These are the pieces for when the result is not what you hoped, or when you want to know what you are agreeing to before you press anything.

• Caption bars, and the two ways to clear one →

  Why clearing the glyphs alone leaves a rectangle, and what one soft pass buys against four sharp sections.

• Flat ground, busy ground →

  The single best predictor of whether you will be pleased with the result, worked through on three grounds.

• Lettering somebody else put there →

  What clearing a mark does and does not change about who owns the picture underneath it.

• How a text detector finds words in pictures →

  Understand candidate regions, recognition confidence and masks before removing detected lettering.

• Removing burned-in date stamps carefully →

  Treat camera date stamps as foreground pixels while preserving nearby texture and keeping provenance.

Two of the five were drafted long before they were published and this page used to say so while they sat unlisted. They are above now. The one on detectors is worth reading in the right spirit: it describes how a scene-text model decides where words are. This site finds lettering with plain arithmetic on the pixels instead — no trained detector has passed the licence, size and speed checks held to it — and shows what it found as boxes you confirm before anything is removed.