I’m hoping to find a free software for windows that is similar to preview on mac, in that you can open an image with it and select/copy text from that image.
With PowerToys you can do it
Microsoft PowerToys has a feature called Text Extractor. You just press your custom shortcut keys, then click and drag a box around the text you want to extract, and it copies the result to your clipboard.
arrived to express this 
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ShareX has this too…check it out