First steps are the hardest

Deciding what to do is sometimes the hardest part of any design process. I choose to explain how one can change the words on a sign and to add another image for an overall composite one.

Open your original image in Photoshop and immediately make a copy of the background layer. One never works off of the original to give yourself a 'safety net' to fall back on when undesired things happen.

My plan is to change 'SHENANDOAH' to 'VICKERS' to make my own National Park. My first thought was to take some of the letters and paste them over the existing ones as you see below.


I then stretched the selected graphic without distortion by holding down the Shift key. You can see the handles on the selected image from where this was being done.

I worked around in this manner for a bit of time until realizing that it would be a lot of trouble to fill in the many spaces left over between the letters with an appropriate background. I switched my process by painting over the lettering I wished to change first. Use the eyedropper tool, it is the one to that is 4th one down on the left column of the tools, to select the exact background brown color. I then used the brush with setting of 100% opacity, darken mode and of a size I felt comfortable working with. My red line leads you to see the brush being used to paint over the existing words.

I was not real happy with the resulting background just yet. The letter outlines still shows so I decided to use the smudge tool to try and eliminate some of the offending lines. You can see my red outlined area where the tool has done it's work below: