Smoothing a rough/jagged signature

[bryanr72]

Greetings-

This is my first post, so if I do something in error, please let me know.

I am trying to clean up a low res signature, for a project.  I've tried the pen tool, & I can use it to some degree, but the signature has little anomalies that make the signature unique to the person.  And that is where I have trouble.

Is there a plug-in or something that can clean up things like this?  I've included the blown up version as a reference, so you can see what I'm working with. 

Any help is appreciated.  The more I can learn, the better I will get.

Thanks!

-Bryan

[rayek.elfin]

Here is a quick cleaned up version. I have to confess that I did not use Photoshop or Illustrator for this, but OpenToonz (animation software) because it has an excellent (drawn) bitmap line art to vector conversion and nice vector clean-up tools. OpenToonz is meant for this type of hand-drawn line cleanup, and does it quickly and nicely without too much user intervention.

I tried Illustrator, but it was too finicky in this case. Someone here can probably come up with a Photoshop-only solution.

The high resolution version is here: http://i67.tinypic.com/10ife4m.png

Anyway, the basic thought process behind this is to convert the original to a vector version with smooth curves without too much detail retained, then use smooth and thickness tools to correct the major issues.

[Terri_Stevens]

Another application that is designed to take signatures and clean them up is FontLabs Scanfont. It is really designed for scanning a signature and then converting it into an actual font. We use it quite a lot where I work as it allows us to sign documents with our actual signatures from within a word processor or DTP program just by selecting your own font. Needless to say something like that is not free-it costs $99 There are Mac and Windows versions and demo versions are available on their site.

https://old.fontlab.com/font-converter/scanfont/

[rayek.elfin]

Oh, thanks: I wasn't aware of that software. Seems very useful, and will keep that in mind when/if a situation arises. Bookmarked!

[bryanr72]

Thank you for the help!  It is much appreciated.

-Bryan

[Chuck Uebele]

Within Photoshop, you can apply a gaussian blur then a threshold adjustment layer to sharpen things back up. Works so-so. Bottom is the original.

[JonathanArias]

i have done this for a previous company. i took the signature to illustrator as a high res image. live traced it. and minimized the number of points/used the smooth tool. came it great and now the signature was vector.

[davescm · Accepted solution]

As an alternative

1. Just trace around the signature with the pen tool to make a path. That way you can make it as smooth, or include any bumps, as you like.

2.Then create a shape from the path

Bottom is original (click to zoom)

Dave

[davescm · Accepted solution]

Now here is a real "off the wall" alternative:

I used my phone with the Adobe Capture app to photograph the signature direct from the screen in post 1.

I then used the app to crop it and turned smoothing on in capture - and saved it to my library. That took seconds.

It immediately appeared in my library in Photoshop as an SVG file.

:

Dave

[Chuck Uebele]

Cool, Dave. We keep asking for them to put some of those features in PS.

[postrophix]

Hi

That's a cool one Dave.

Pierre

[davescm]

Chuck  Yes it would be great if we could get the power of the desktop apps behind some of those phone app features. An image trace/vectorise function similar to illustrator would be great.

Thanks Pierre - I've not seen you here for a while - I hope you are well

Dave

[bryanr72]

I'm going to try that!!  Thanks!!

[Bobdog goes hard in paint]

Came here to let you know in 2023 this is still a great solution, thanks Dave

[davescm]

Thanks for the comment.
This is an old thread and, in current versions, there is no need to capture the screenshot using the phone app. If you open Photoshop's 'libraries' panel and go to the bottom right of that panel, you will see a + symbol.  Click it  and you will see Ca Extract from Image. That takes you straight into the Capture tools where you can create a shape from your image, smooth it and save it to your library. 

I reckon it is one of the most well hidden features in Photoshop - but it is useful all the same 🙂

Dave