By maxing out the brightness and stripping away the contrast, you force the subtle differences between the "highlighter" pixels and the "text" pixels to separate. If the marker wasn’t 100% opaque, the hidden text will suddenly glow or silhouette against the background, making it perfectly legible. The Danger of "Smart" Erasers and Image Metadata
If it's a "Highlighter" tool, use Brightness/Contrast . By maxing out the brightness and stripping away
Once you have used exposure settings to make the text faintly visible, run the image through an OCR tool to "read" it for you. Once you have used exposure settings to make
This is the most common method for casual privacy, often done with a screenshot tool's marker or brush. The user "paints" over the text with a solid color, permanently altering the image's pixels. If the paint is opaque, the underlying text is gone, and the only option is inpainting to guess what was there. However, a surprising number of tools apply this marker as a semi-transparent layer, leaving the original text data present in the image file's metadata or subtle pixel variations that advanced AI can sometimes detect. If the paint is opaque, the underlying text