How to make signature darker in scanned document in photoshop

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)

3 3 Upvotes Community Expert , Nov 29, 2017 Nov 29, 2017 davescm • Community Expert , Nov 29, 2017 Nov 29, 2017

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.

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/t5/photoshop-ecosystem-discussions/smoothing-a-rough-jagged-signature/m-p/9536740#M133854 Nov 29, 2017 Nov 29, 2017

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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.

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.