Turn My Signature into an Image - Unlock the Power of eSigning

How to eSign a document: turn my signature into an image

right guys in this video i am going to teach you how you can turn your own signature into a logo or a watermark that you can put on your website or over your photographs and make yourself look really professional we are going to do it in photoshop but you don't actually have to use photoshop you can use any imaging program where you can layer one picture on top of another now one of our most popular videos is how to use signature fonts as logos and watermarks and if that's something you're interested in doing obviously go and check that video out it's i'll put a link up here for you but in the comments of that video lots of people were saying how do you turn your own signature into a watermark it's actually really easy that's what we're gonna do right now now firstly you're gonna need a signature obviously so the first thing is use a thick black marker pen and do a signature on a piece of paper here's my version here nice and big so a nice big signature black pen white paper you scan that in using any scanner scan it in at around 300 dpi that will be absolutely fine you save that and then you open it up in photoshop and crop it just like what i've got here and as you can see i've turned my name to mickey mouse all right so i've just pretended i've got a pretend signature here mickey mouse alright and it's nicely cropped and it's black on white and that's it really and now what we need to do is we need to turn this signature into what's called a png so a png image allows you to have a transparent background which is exactly what we want because we want our signature to be like this and we want the background to be transparent so we can drag and drop it and put it wherever we want okay so the first thing you want to do is actually turn this image into a grayscale image and basically you're telling photoshop that you only want to be working in blacks and whites really and that's exactly what we want to do so to do that we're going to go up to image mode grayscale this box will come up that's saying do you want to discard the color information yes of course we do so we just click discard and now what we've got is a grayscale image and you can see that up here where it says gray slash eight now the next thing that we want to do is give it a bit more contrast so that we've got as much black and whiteness as possible okay so for that i'm going to go up to image adjustments here and brightness and contrast and i'm just going to whack that oh not the brightness sorry i'm going to wake the contrast up to roughly about 80 odd and there you go you can see it's a lot more black the um the actual text there is a lot more black let's go back to zero and there you go and up to about 80. and there you go it's a lot more blacker and that's what we want so i'm going to click ok and i'm going to zoom in a little bit so we can see it just a little not that much so that we can see it just a little bit better how about there that's it okay the next thing that i want to do is actually fill that text with black so to do that i'm going to go to what's called select color range and just select the color black so up here you've got select i'm going to come down to color range and then what you do is you will click on the color that you want photoshop to select and so for instance if i click white you can see what it's doing here it's selecting all the white and if i click black it selects the black and that's exactly what you want make sure that your fuzziness here is quite high i've got mine set to around about 150 and that seems to work quite fine and then you just click ok and as you can see what we've got now is a selection of just the text now the next thing that i'm going to do is actually smooth off my writing okay i'm going to make my writing a bit more smoother and a bit more curvier right now this is an optional thing actually you don't have to do this but i think it looks really cool when you're turning signatures and scripts writing into you know graphics like this so to do that we're going to go up to select here and go down to select and mask and your select and mask properties box will appear like this now you may not be viewing yours in black and white at this stage and that's not a problem you go over to view here you click on this drop down and you select black and white by default it's probably going to look something like that but actually it's much better to view this particular image in black and white so view black and white click on the arrow to get rid of it down here you've got something called smooth so i'm going to click on that smooth slider and i'll just drag it right the way up so you can see what's happening i mean look you can really really smooth out your text if you want it to but i'm just going to smooth it out slightly you know because it was already quite um scripty and quite flowy so i'm just going to smooth it to around about 10 maybe a little bit more yeah that looks alright that'll do and as you can see i've got a slightly smoother script exactly what i want i'm now going to come down to shift edge and i'm going to move it up to around about plus five and all that does is shift the edge exactly what it says and i'll just show you that so if i slide it right the way up to 100 it's shifting the edge outwards you know it's making it thicker if i click on this and i go backwards it's making your text a lot thinner you know and that's not actually what i want i'm just trying to expand the selection a little bit so i'm going to shift the edge to about five percent now it just depends on your handwriting whether this the shift in the edge is going to work or not just experiment to see you might want to slide it a bit more or a bit less you know and the next thing we need to do is output to a selection so down here it says output 2 selection is what you need to choose from this drop-down list and you click ok so the next thing that i'm going to do is i'm going to fill that selection with black and then i'm going to turn it into a png but before i show you how to do that i want to take this opportunity to tell you about the courses that we run over at the school of photography.com if you want to learn photoshop properly come over and see us we've got a structured professional photoshop course that will teach you photoshop with ease plus we've got photography courses lightroom courses anything photography related and we've got thousands of students all over the world go and check our feedback out on google trustpilot facebook wherever you want to all right we've got thousands of happy happy students you know we make learning easy so come over and see us at the school of photography.com if you want to learn photography and if you want to learn photoshop properly right let's go back in and create this png so to make this a png we need a transparent background like i said earlier now at this point if i try to delete the background it won't let me and that is because the layer is locked so to delete the background on an image you need to make sure that the layer is unlocked and it's very easy to do all you do is you click the lock symbol and it unlocks it turns it from a background into a layer as you can see there okay so now i've got an unlocked layer i've got my text selected and now effectively if i hit the backspace it's going to delete whatever's inside that selection i don't want that deleted because what's inside this selection at the minute is the text that i actually want so what you need to do is you need to go up to select and inverse and as the name suggests it's inverse that selection and now effectively what i've got selected is the white then all you do is you hit the backspace on your keyboard which is the key that you use you know to delete words and whatever else and there you go we've now got a transparent background now next i want to make my signature jet black so i'm going to inverse the selection again because i've deleted the background now that bits done i'm going to reverse it again so i've got the text selected and then i'm going to fill that selection with black simple as that so we go up to select inverse again and then you can press shift and f5 which is the shortcut key to fill or you go up to edit fill and then this box will pop up and you're going to select black from the contents here make sure your opacity is at 100 make sure the mode is normal and this preserved transparency is unticked and you click ok and there you go as you can see is now filled that area with black and then quite simply i'm just going to deselect it then i'll have my signature all right to do that we're going to press ctrl and d together or command and d if you're on a mac and here we have a lovely black smooth signature now nine times out of ten that's going to be fine it all depends on how much ink your pen's got in it and stuff like that but what you can see is at the end of my signature here it kind of fades off a little bit and we've got a few little bits that are not as smooth and as not as nice as i would like so the first thing that i'm actually going to do is i'm going to add a solid color underneath this just to check really just to check to see if it's going to look okay to do that i'm going to come down to the adjustment layer icon here click on it i'm going to go to solid color i'm going to choose white and then i'm going to drag this color fill underneath this layer and there we go so now we can clearly see we've got black up against white like this now to me um this just needs tied in up a little bit just this section here possibly this section here now that's really easy to tidy up all you do is you bring your selection back and you paint in the selection it's as simple as that really so to get your selection back what you need to do is hold down the control or the command key if you're on a mac and you can see that little square comes up there on your cursor and then you click on this layer 0 here and as you can see your selection comes back make sure as well at this point that you are selected on the layer here and that is because you're painting on that layer you're not painting on the solid color fill there you're painting on this layer next thing is you select a black brush so i'm just going to click on this icon here to bring my foreground and background color to black and white so the foreground color is black i'm going to grab the brush tool i'm going to make sure that my opacity is on 100 my flow's on 100 and then i'm going to come back down to here and i'm going to quite simply paint over these areas and you can see it's just filled them in a little bit and you can see that's doing a really good job and it's as simple as that really now it's just a matter of going control and delete to delete the selection again and that's it that's looking like a really lovely smooth signature i can see that there's a little bit at the edge there that i don't want so for that i'm just going to grab the eraser tool and i'm just going to rub that out simple really so now what i've got is a lovely smooth solid black signature you can leave it there if you want to but you can also add other bits to it if you want to again this is an extra you don't have to do this bit but for me i think i'm going to put photography in this area here again it's something personal that you may do or you may not do it's entirely up to you so to do that all i need to do is grab the text tool come over to my image here click on it roughly where i want it to be and i'm going to type in photography just like that now to adjust it what you want to do is get up your character panel which is this one here now as you can see i've already got it docked over in my workspace if you can't see it all you do is you go window and you go down to character and you make sure that it's ticked and it will pop up over here now you may have noticed that all of the letters that i typed there were in capitals and that's because i've already been practicing that's this one here that's all caps and i'll just show you you need to select all of your text and then i can turn the all caps off or i can turn it on again all right so while it's selected we can do all of our adjustments okay i quite like this font myriad pro so i'm gonna i'm gonna leave it on that font there over here the the text size i can make it bigger obviously and i can make it smaller so i'm going to make it a little bit bigger and i'm going to move it over to around about there and maybe a little bit bigger again move it over to there that's too big so let's type in manually now 25 and press enter that looks about right to me and no maybe a little bit smaller than that 24 there we go just like that now the other thing that i like to do with this particular font again it depends on what font you use is i like to spread the spacing out so for that we come over to this section here of the character panel and you can type in manually there or you hover over this va symbol and you just go drag it left and right and you get it to roughly how you want it to be i think about there is nice and i've also bolded it and the reason i've bolded it is because my font here my signature is quite bold and you want it to match well i want it to match again you do whatever you want whatever preference that you want so when you're happy with all of that we're going to click the tick at the top and then i'm going to grab the move tool and i'm just going to move it around so i can get it roughly where i want it to be and i think about that is good now i'm going to show you a really easy trick to change this to different colors because of course you may want a black one a white one a gray one a pink one whatever you want alright so let's show you a really good trick for that all you need to do is select both of your layers here which is obviously your signature and the text there and you do that by holding down the control or command key and clicking on both of them so you select both of them i'm going to press ctrl and g that's command on a mac and then it creates a group here group one and if you want to be nice and neat and tidy like me you double click on that and you type in text press enter and now what we've got is the text all in one group there and as you can see i'm hiding it and bringing it back so while i've got nice black text i might as well save my black version of a png okay so let's go and do that now like i said to you a png has got a transparent background so if i save this now as a png i would have a white background it's as simple as that so all i do is i come and hide the background color fill layer and then i've got a transparent background so to save the png with a transparent background it needs to have a transparent background alright that's very very important so make sure you hide that layer below and then obviously all i've got now is text on a transparent background i'm going to go file save as from the drop down box here i'm going to select png it's as simple as that and then i'm going to call this one black signature logo just like that and then i click save this box will pop up just select the large file size that will do i'm going to click ok and now let's open up the folder where i've got everything and there you can see it says black signature logo png there's my original scan there's my crop scan and that is my black logo png okay so now let's show you how easy it is to change the color of these pngs all right very simple see this blank part here of this group we double click on it and up pops what's called the layer styles property box she's going to cancel that because you can also right click on your group and you can go to blending options at the top here and again the layer style properties box will open up now all you need to do is go to color overlay tick it select the color overlay box here and then here where it's got the color you click on it and of course you can select white uh or mid gray or black obviously we've already got black for now i'm going to click select white and i'll show you how to do the color one in a minute and i'm just going to click ok there like that and i'm going to click ok again and now as you can see i've got a white version so i just need to save that and again it's file save as select png from your drop down this time i'm going to click on this black signature logo just so that i get the words here and i'm going to delete where it says black i'm quite simply going to put white in and click save click ok again there open up my folder and now what you can see is i've got a white version and i've got a black version it's as simple as that let's hide this box so for most people a black or a white one or a mid gray one is going to be absolutely fine but what if you do want a red or a purple one well we've got to turn this image back to rgb if you remember when we was um making our text all nice and solid and bold we turned it to grayscale so we need to turn the image back to rgb before we can change the color of it so let's just do that and you do that quite simply by going up to image mode and we're going to change it back to rgb color this box will pop up we don't want to merge it you know we still want to keep our original layers just in case you want to go back and change the text or whatever so i'm going to click don't merge and now as you can see at the top here it doesn't say grace slash eight it says rgb slash eight and that means we can change it to different colors so let's do that i'm gonna come over to here to my effects again i'm gonna double click on the effects this box will pop up again i'm going to click on color overlay again i'm going to click on this box and this time i'm going to select let's go a bit wacky shall we let's select a purple one that'll do click ok click ok again and again save this one as a png file save as png from the drop down select one of these so i don't have to type it all in and this time i'm just going to put purple and then click save again you want the large file size i'm going to click ok so now what i've got here is three different versions and again you can make as many versions as you want all right it's as simple as that a good idea at this point is also to save it as a photoshop file so that you can go back and work on it if you need to in the future that's again very easy we're going to go file we're going to go save as and we're going to just make sure that we've got photoshop psd save selected from the drop down and i'm just going to call this signature logo there we go and just click ok there and now the next bit is really simple you just drag and drop these pngs on top of any image you want so i've got here a couple of pictures i've got a colorful one here and then i've got a muted color one it's not quite black and white but it's nearly black and white okay so let's open up that folder again here it is here and for this black and white type of image i think i'm going to use the black signature okay now this is important you drag and drop from the folder here onto this image you make sure that you've got nothing selected underneath you're not using any tools because that will stop this from happening you quite simply grab it from the folder make sure you're holding onto it you pull it over the top of your image you can see that there's a little plus symbol there and then you release and there we have our signature logo on top of our image i can resize it if i want to for the sake of this video i'm just going to go quite big actually and let's put it down to about there click the tick at the top and i've now got a signature on top of my image over here in my layers palette i am going to take the opacity down i think to around about 80 ish that'll do the job let's hide that and bring it back hide it and bring it back and there you go i've just signed my image digitally on photoshop for argument's sake now let's go over to the colorful one which is this one here open up my folder again this time i'm going to grab the white signature logo drag it on top move it down let's make it nice and big again put it in the middle there we go like that click the tick at the top lower the opacity to about 80 odd percent somewhere like that and there you go so now i've got another version there and a black version there and quite simply you would now save that and what you've got is a signature saved on top of your picture you can resize the image from here so you can have a low res version a high-res version etc if you're clever enough you can add that to a watermark in lightroom and you can export batches of pictures at once with your signature watermark over the top now of course we teach you how to do that properly in our lightroom course over at the school of photography.com so come over and check that out if you want to learn how to do that if this video has helped you out you need to help us out all right it's like a trade-off and it's very easy for you to help us out hit that like button subscribe to our channel and hit the bell that's all you need to do and it really helps us out and also put in the comments what you think of this video we love to hear from our audience so i hope that helps you turn your own signature into a watermark or a logo for your company or website and if you want to learn photography properly don't forget to come over to the school of photography dot where we specialize in that i'll see you in the next video [Music] you