if you want to know how to digitize your signature in photoshop this is the right tutorial now a couple best practices first use a dark pen or a black pen on a white sheet of paper and then the best thing to do would probably be to scan it in but you could also take a picture of it with your phone that's what i did in this tutorial the quality is a little bit lower because some of the colors of the paper come through but we're going to be working through that and if you scan it in to your computer that's an even better option let's hop into photoshop and take a look so once we're in photoshop we're going to want to open up our photo so i would just go to file open and then find the photo i think mine's probably in my downloads most recent and let's see if this is it i just hit space bar here on a mac and that's it so my signature i'm going to open that right up now you'll already see this is not a perfect photo so i've got some work to do first i want to crop this into just the signature get rid of any of this other mess so i'm going to grab this lasso tool and click and drag around the outside of my signature you don't have to be super close to the edge just enough to isolate it like that then we'll go up to image down to crop so now we've cropped in to the edges of our signature right here next thing you know is in the layers panel there's actually also a channels if you don't see that go up to window down to channels and pull that up we're going to turn off the green and blue channels and just look at the red channel once we have the red channel highlighted go way back up to image drop that down to adjustments and then levels this is how we're going to isolate the signature from the paper you'll see this big peak here that's where most of the data of the photo is and we're going to call most of that white so we're going to bring this slider down until we start to remove all the excess information of the paper leaving only the signature but the signature also gets a little bit taken out of it so we're going to pull the black levels up a little bit until we darken that signature up and then with the grays here in the middle the mid tones you can pull those down or up to your liking to get the signature effect that you want so just work on these two tabs back and forth to find the perfect level of your signature now we're also going to take care of any excess data that's outside here there may be some that we can't see because it's so light now but we can go ahead and hit okay on the levels and down here in our channels if we hold command on a mac or control on a pc we get this little icon that lets us make a selection of what's on this channel so when we click it makes that selection now the selection is kind of reversed from what we want so we're going to press shift command i or shift ctrl i to invert that selection shift command or shift control i if you don't want to do that or you're confused go up to select and you can click inverse right here so what we don't want are the marching ants around the outside of our page here we want them only around the signature itself things are looking pretty good in my opinion so we'll go back over to layers and we can actually turn on rgb again no problem now go back over to layers we can unlock this layer and turn it off so now we just have our selection and the transparent background then we go down here to this little half circle kind of dark on one side light on the other we click on it and we can add an adjustment layer and this we're going to add a solid color it's going to automatically fill in that solid color with anything that you want here inside of the selection that we had so if we wanted it to be black we can do that hit okay and now we have our signature to see it on a white piece of paper we could add a new layer press shift f5 that's fill that's also up here in edit down to fill right there and we can fill it with white just like that so now we have a white piece of paper or like a white layer underneath this so we can actually see our signature and so at this point if you want to make any edits to it basically you have a solid fill completely solid black fill with a mask on it that is the signature that you scanned in this mask can be edited so let's say we wanted to get rid of a few of these artifacts that i see out here what we can do is click on that mask press b for your brush so now we have the brush tool we can use our left and right brackets to scale this brush up and down what we want to make sure up here in the size is that the hardness is all the way up to 100 and then the size you can edit here as well now once we've done that we can paint on this mask in black or white if we paint in black it's going to remove i'm pressing command or ctrl z to undo that if we paint in white which is our other foreground color down here press x to flip flop those or this arrow right here you can click as well to flip-flop but yeah x is quicker so we're going to paint in black any of these excess spots and what you can do to really cover it is just make sure you're kind of painting outside of the signature here kind of move around paint and just make sure you clean up any excess points that around the outside of the signature anything that might have shown up from the paper that stayed after we did all the levels if you scanned it in and look there's some extra points inside here we can remove those as well you can clean this up however you like if you want to remove these extra points right here on the end you can do that too to kind of reshape what's going on with your signature and if we zoom back out a quick way to figure out if we have removed all the points is to press command or control t which is the transform tool and you can see this should go out to the edges so it hits the top of the s hits the bottom of the p we go a little further right than the edge of the end of the signature here and a little further left than the edge of the s that probably means there's a little bit of data out here and we want to clip that to the edge so we can go back to that mask make sure we click on it go back to that brush tool and we can do another thing here we could use the lasso tool and just kind of use this tool to make sure we make a selection around the edge and then all the way around the outside of our paper here of all of this space we could press shift f5 and we could fill that in with black because we're filling this space in on the mask in black which means it's basically going to remove any of that extra detail we could do the same thing over here just go around the edge of that signature and all we're doing here is cleaning up the outside of our signature really we're just being picky at this point we'll fill it with black just like that now we could always command or control t and you'll see we've really removed any of that outside detail now it goes to the edge of the signature here and pretty much the edge there there's probably just a few things right in here nothing to worry about but that is your signature now completely isolated and completely on a transparent background as well so make sure you don't have any other layers in here we can just delete these by selecting them both and hitting delete yes i want to delete those now we just have this isolated and what we can do is go to file we can go to save or save as or save as a copy these are a couple things here in photoshop now that don't make as much sense anymore first i would save it and that's going to let us save this as a psd file which i would do just to keep that version and now to save an image i would go to save as copy and switch the format to a png so you get your signature.png and save that and then for this large file size is fine hit ok now this is your actual signature and you've got it in a png so you could pull that in anywhere you want and then you also have the psd file that you could come in here and double click on this solid to change the color to anything you want as well so that's a cool way to digitize your signature here in photoshop if you want to vectorize it in illustrator check out the video linked down below or on your screen right now