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]

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]

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