Extracting a brush-stroke(s) from background?

Please bear with me, I'm a novice:

Quick summary: I'm designing a flyer, I open up a photo and begin adding text, filters etc I then add some brush-strokes around the header text, effectively drawing something that looks like a grassy beach with fence-posts.

By chance, it has come out really nice and makes for a great logo- something I couldn't really re-create.

Is it possible to separate the brush-strokes from the background (which is the photo, and not a separate layer 'Background'). The drawing has not come out as a seperate layer.

PS it would be impossible to extract the drawing because of the detail in the brush-strokes

Thanks for any help.
Barney

It can be done, but how easily depends on how much contrast there is between the brush strokes and the image.

Check the channels to see if the brush strokes are more distinct on one. Maybe you can do an easy selection or maybe duplictae a high contrast channel and increase the contrast even more to help with making a selection.

Another possibility: do you have an untouched version of the background (even in History)? If you do, you can bring it in as a layer and set the Blending to Difference or Exclusion and get the strokes isolated in that way, again with the aim of making a good selection.

In the future, stuff like this should always be done on a seperate layer.

Thanks Ed, that is a great help, even if it doesn't work out it will be a good opportunity to practice such methods...

I'm going to try and do it again, on a separate layer. It may not be identical, but I may end up liking the results, none the less.

Thanks again
B