Expert: LizaL - 11/12/2005

Question
Hello,
I have a few pictures that have unknown text on them
but when you zoom it it just gets too blurry. Is there a plugin that will help me figure out what i am looking at?

Thankyou

Answer
Hi Joshua,

As far as I know, there's no plugin that will help this. What you probably have are pictures that are in a JPEG format -- meaning they've already been compressed, and have no layers, and this makes it harder to isolate the text and read it.

If you had files with layers, it might be a different story. You could select the text on the text layer, and enlarge it, just as you could with text you'd created yourself. But once text is merged into a file -- as it is when a photo is made into a JPEG -- it becomes embedded as pixels into the actual picture, making it very difficult, if not impossible, to read. And of course at that point you're not able to edit the text, either.

They make plugins for zooming text in PDFs, but I don't know of any that will enhance text that is part of a picture. I did  find, though, this one plugin on the Adobe site that helps "cure"' distortion -- it might help situations with text, too, I don't know. Here's the link:
http://store.adobe.com/store/products/master.jhtml?id=catPlugins_Andro_Lens

Let me know if this makes sense to you, and if not, I'll be happy to clarify. I can also take a look at one of your pictures if you want to send it to me, but honestly, I don't think there's a lot of hope in reading it, if it's part of the picture and not on a separate layer.

Lisa