Which pictures can become a mark
The studio opens on a transparent board with the picker ready: choose the picture to turn into a mark. What works is artwork with one background colour — a logo exported on white, a letterhead scan, a stamp pressed on paper, a signature photographed flat in good light. What does not is a scene. Both cases are honest about themselves on screen: the before-and-after pair shows exactly what will be drawn, and a border that is not one flat colour is named as such before you rely on the result.
Stamps and signatures photographed on paper
- Photograph it flat. Daylight, no shadow across the paper, the phone held parallel. A scanner is better still.
- Open it here. It lands on the board as a logo mark, with a key colour proposed from its border.
- Cut it to one colour. Threshold turns the ink into one colour on transparency; move the cut until the paper grain is gone.
- Tint it. White, black or any colour, keeping the shape. Then save it as a PNG or place it on a photo.
One colour, or the background knocked out
The two clean-ups do different jobs. The knockout removes one colour — the background — and keeps everything else as it was, so a two-colour logo stays two colours. The threshold keeps only what is darker than the cut and draws it in a single colour, which is what a stamp or a signature wants: the blue of the ballpoint and the grey of the paper both stop mattering. Either can be combined with the tint and with invert, and every one of them is a recipe setting, applied from the original pixels each time and undone with ⌘Z.
The result can be saved as a transparent PNG at the width you choose for use anywhere, or used straight away: open a photograph with the folder button and the cleaned-up mark is placed on it. A signature can also be drawn rather than photographed, on the signature page.
What this cannot cut out
- A subject from a photograph — a person, a product on a table, a pet. That needs a cut-out tool, and this is not one.
- A background with a gradient or a shadow across it. The key removes one colour; the shadow stays.
- Fine colour detail under the threshold. A threshold is one colour by design.
Questions about making a watermark from a picture
Can any picture become a watermark?
Flat artwork can: a logo on a plain background, a rubber stamp or a signature on paper, a drawing on white. The background is one colour, so a colour key or a lightness cut separates it cleanly. A photograph of a scene cannot — there is no single background colour to remove — and this page will not pretend otherwise.
How do I make a scanned stamp transparent?
Open the scan here, then switch on “Threshold to one colour”. Everything darker than the cut becomes the mark and everything lighter becomes transparent, with a soft edge two lightness steps wide so the ink does not stair-step. Move the cut until the paper texture disappears and the strokes stay whole, then tint it the colour you want.
Why does a photo of a person not work?
Because separating a person from a scene is a cut-out, which needs a segmentation model and produces a different kind of file. This page converts flat artwork with a deterministic colour key and a lightness threshold; it does not extract a subject from a photograph, and it says so on the control.