In reply to:

...using photoshop to recreate it, I get too much noise from the blur..

The way I did it with Gimp was to select-by-colour all the text, then grow the selection by 3 pixels, then fill a layer using that selection, placing the original on top, taking about 1 minute all told. Maybe that helps?
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Toby Speight
030103016 (80GB Mk2a, blue)
030102806 (0GB Mk2a, blue)