Extract your signature from a photo — sized for a form, or cut out on a transparent background
Presets are the sizes people most often report being asked for, not an official list. Always type the numbers printed in your own notification.
Turn ink strength up if a faint pencil or a dry pen comes out broken. Turn it down if paper texture or ruled lines show through. Untick crop to keep the whole photo as you framed it.
Sign a sheet of plain white paper, photograph it with your phone, and this tool extracts the writing from the page. What comes back is clean signature images - black ink on a pure white background - at the exact pixel size and within the file size limits an application form demands. It is free, there is no signup, and your image is never stored.
It works as a signature background remover for the common case that actually matters: the paper, the shadow across it and the colour cast from your room all go, and what is left is the ink. Unlike a general cut-out tool it then sizes the result for you, because a signature that looks perfect and is the wrong number of pixels still gets rejected.
Paper looks white to you because your eyes correct for the light. A camera does not. Photograph a page indoors and one side is brighter than the other; hold the phone over it and your own hand casts a shadow across a corner. The result is a page that ranges from near-white on one side to mid-grey on the other, with your signature sitting somewhere in between.
That is why the usual advice - turn up the brightness, turn up the contrast - produces such poor results. Those controls apply the same correction to every pixel. Set them hard enough to whiten the dark corner and the bright side loses the thin parts of your strokes; set them gently enough to keep the strokes and the dark corner stays grey. Push further and the shadowed corner turns into a solid black block, which is worse than the photo you started with.
This tool works differently. Before it decides anything, it measures how bright the paper is at every point on the page, building a map of the lighting with the ink taken out of it. It then subtracts that map, so what is left is a measure of how much darker each spot is than the paper immediately around it. A stroke in the shadowed corner and the same stroke in the bright corner end up reading the same. Only then is a threshold applied. A shadow across your page is removed rather than filled in, and a hard shadow edge does not become a black stripe.
People arrive here wanting one of two different things, so the page asks which before it asks anything else.
Both come from the same extraction. The colour is applied as a flat fill rather than copied out of your photo, which is the better way round: your pen photographed under a lamp is a slightly different colour in every part of the stroke, whereas a chosen colour is even everywhere and does not depend on the lighting you happened to have.
The cut-out is clean for a reason worth explaining. Tools that pull a signature straight out of a photograph carry paper colour in the soft edges of every stroke, which shows up as a grey halo the moment you place the signature on a white page. Here the ink is separated from the paper first, so by the time the background is made transparent there is no paper colour left to leak. Put the transparent PNG back onto a white page and you get a pixel-for-pixel identical result to the flat white version - the transparency costs nothing at all.
Upload forms almost always check two separate things, and getting either wrong means a rejection with an unhelpful error message.
The buttons above are the sizes people most commonly report being asked for. They are a starting point to save you typing, not a transcription of any official document - portals change their requirements, and the numbers in your own notification always win.
The result is only as good as what it is given, and thirty seconds of care beats any setting on this page.
It handles a signature on otherwise blank paper. It is not a document scanner. A photo of a full page also needs straightening and perspective correction - the page in your photo is a keystoned quadrilateral, not a rectangle - and this tool does none of that. If you point it at a page of text it will say so rather than hand you a bad result quietly.
It does not resize the transparent PNG for you either, and that is deliberate rather than an omission. A lossless PNG has no quality setting to trade against a file size, so a KB window cannot be honoured at all - the two features would fight each other. That is why the size controls appear only on the form side.
Because you asked for a minimum file size and the picture is smaller than that. The extra bytes are blank filler stored in a part of the file that every image viewer skips over. The signature you see is exactly the signature you downloaded.
Your handwriting is a different shape from the box the form asked for. Fitting it inside and padding with white keeps your proportions; stretching it to fill the box would not.
Raise the ink strength. If that does not fix it, the photo is the problem rather than the setting - retake it in better light with a darker pen. A pencil signature is the hardest case for any tool.
Lower the ink strength, and make sure "Remove specks" is ticked. Textured, recycled or slightly crumpled paper is the usual cause; plain printer paper gives a much better result.
Black for most printed and scanned documents. Blue if you want it obvious that the document was signed rather than photocopied, which some organisations specifically ask for. The rest are there because people have a pen they have always used, and a signature that does not look like your signature defeats the point.
No. It turns everything into black and white with no grey in between, which is right for ink and wrong for a face. For photos with a size limit, use Compress to Exact Size instead.
No. It is processed in memory and discarded as soon as your result is sent back. Nothing is written to disk, logged, or kept, and there is no account to create. If you want to strip the hidden data your camera puts in a photo before sharing it elsewhere, see the Photo Privacy Cleaner.