Clearing text without clearing the wrong thing
Text is thin, high-contrast and everywhere: on signs, shirts, packaging, screens and the corners of scanned prints. Painting over it by hand either misses the anti-aliased edges — leaving a ghost of every letter — or swallows half the background around it. Text mode does the selecting for you: it finds compact, busy, letter-like regions, and when you click one it masks the glyphs themselves, grown slightly to cover outlines, drop shadows and the soft edge pixels that type always has.
How the text finder works
It is deliberately not an OCR engine. Removing text only needs where it is, not what it says, so nothing is recognised and no words are ever produced — not on screen, not in memory, not in any log. The finder looks for the signature of lettering: strokes that alternate with gaps along a line, dense edges across the whole width of a block, and a height in proportion to the photo. Letters are joined into words and lines, and each becomes a box you can pick. It runs in a background worker on a reduced copy, so even a large photo is analysed in moments.
It works best on what people most often want gone — printed captions, dates, labels, sign lettering and overlays on reasonably plain backgrounds. Text on very busy textures can be missed; the Rectangle tool beside it, with edge snapping, covers those in one drag.
Use it on your own images
EraseObject is a general photo-cleanup tool. Use Text mode on captions you added, labels on your own products, signs in your own photographs and screenshots you made. Removing someone else's watermark or ownership mark from their work is not what this is for, and the result would not make the image yours to use.