Signature suddenly blacked out

Question

Hi there! I use Acrobat Pro - 64-bit. We have a contract that has to be signed on the bottom of each page and up until now, everything was fine. The signature was there and we were able to see it clearly. All of the sudden today I opened the contract and the signature is blacked out! There is a somewhat transparent black box covering the signature. You can see (sort of) that there is some writing underneath the box but can't tell what it is. Where did this come from? Is there any way to get rid of it so that the signature can be seen again?

Thank you in advance for any help you can provide!

P.S. I have attached a copy of the file.

MikelKlink · Answer

As far as the file as PDF file is concerned, each page only shows a single black&white bitmap image and no additional objects over it; the black box is part of that image and cannot simply be removed.

The file also contains Photoshop specific data. If you open the file with Photoshop, additional image information may be available.

Otherwise, if you are sure you saw the signature in Acrobat: Could it be that you have executed a PDF compression tool to compress your PDFs since then? As mentioned the bitmap images are pure black&white, not grayscale, let alone color. If originally the signature was easy to recognize, e.g. black or blue on a gray or colored background, such a compression run may have caused the appearance you see now.

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