Make a signature image from paper, with the paper made see-through

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Open any PDF that needs signing, then follow the steps below. The picture never leaves your device: the pad reads it in your browser tab.

Sign on paper the right way

The cleanup in the pad works by brightness: light pixels become see-through, dark pixels stay. So what you want on the paper is the strongest possible difference between ink and paper.

1. Plain white paper. Printer paper is ideal. No lines, no squares, no coloured notepad.
2. A dark pen. A black or dark blue ballpoint or gel pen. Not pencil, not light blue, not a felt tip that bleeds into the paper.
3. Normal size. Sign as large as you would on a contract, roughly 5 to 7 cm wide. A tiny signature photographed up close looks fine; a huge one shrunk down looks thin.
4. Sign 3 to 5 times on the same sheet, with space between them, and pick the one that looks most like you.

Photograph it so the paper reads white

1. Put the sheet on a table near a window in daylight. Turn off the ceiling light if it throws a yellow cast.
2. Hold the phone straight above the signature, parallel to the paper. An angle makes the signature lean.
3. Make sure your hand and phone throw no shadow across the ink. A shadow is the most common reason the cleanup fails.
4. Take the photo, then crop it close around the signature in the phone’s photo editor. If the paper looks grey in the photo, raise the brightness or exposure until it looks white; the ink stays dark.

Then move the picture to the device you sign on, unless that is the phone itself.

Upload it to the signature pad

1. Open the PDF and press New signature in the Sign tool’s bar.
2. Open the Upload tab and press Choose a picture. PNG, JPG and WebP work. A picture longer than 1200 pixels on its longer side is scaled down to that.
3. Check the preview, and leave Make the white paper see-through ticked.
4. Press Use this signature, then click the page where it goes. It lands about 6 cm wide; drag it onto the line and pull a corner to fit.
5. Save. A photo of a signature goes into the page as a picture with a see-through background, so the lines and text under it stay visible.

What the see-through step actually does

The pad looks at how bright each pixel is. Anything very close to white becomes fully see-through, anything clearly dark stays exactly as it is, and the band in between fades, so the edges of the strokes stay soft instead of jagged.

That rule is why the photo matters. We ran the cleanup on test pictures with the same ink and paper of different brightness:

The paper in your photo	What the pad does with it	What you see on the page
White, as in daylight or after brightening	Fully see-through	Only the ink
Light grey, as under a ceiling light	Partly see-through	A faint grey box around the ink
Grey, as in a shadow or a dim room	Mostly kept	A visible grey rectangle
Lined or squared paper	Printed lines are usually dark enough to stay, at least in part	Ink plus the lines

If the result shows a grey box, press Cancel, brighten the photo, and upload it again. If you would rather keep the picture exactly as it is (a signature on a coloured stamp, say), untick Make the white paper see-through.

Keep it for next time

getPDF does not store your signature. It stays in the Sign tool’s bar while your tab is open, ready to place as often as you need, also in the next file you open in the same tab; close the tab and it is gone. That is deliberate: nothing about your signature is left on a server or in the browser.

So the reusable copy is your photo. Keep the cropped picture in a folder of your own, next to your documents, and upload it each time; it takes a few seconds and gives the identical signature on every document. Reusing your signature covers the routine, and draw, type or upload weighs this method against the other 2.

The honest part

The cleanup is simple on purpose. It removes light paper, not shadows, coloured paper or lines. A photo with a shadow across it, a crumpled sheet or a signature on a yellow sticky note needs a real background remover first. The getPNG background remover, a sister site that also runs on your device, does that; then upload its PNG with the see-through box unticked.

A picture of a signature is still a simple electronic signature. It looks like your ink, but it carries no certificate and proves nothing about who placed it. For everyday documents that is fine; where a qualified signature is required, a photo is not one. The law, in plain words, explains where the line is. This is not legal advice.

Only your own signature goes in the pad. A photo of somebody else’s signature on a document is forgery, whatever the tool.

Anyone who has your signature picture can paste it. Treat the file like a key: keep it in your own folder, not in a shared one, and do not send it to people as a loose picture. Inside a signed PDF it is part of the page, as ink on a paper copy is.