Drawn or typed
The studio opens on the signature pad. Sign it as you would on paper; when you lift the pen the signature is on the picture, sized as a share of the frame like every other mark here, and placed in the bottom-right corner to start. Prefer not to draw? “Or type it” sets your name in one of the bundled script faces — Great Vibes, Dancing Script or the handwritten Caveat — as a text mark you can style like any other.
- Sign the pad. Mouse, finger or stylus. Undo takes back one stroke.
- Choose the ink. Any colour, or auto ink, which picks black or white per picture from what is under the signature.
- Set the pen. Pen width is a share of the signature's height, so it scales with it.
- Place and save. Place, Tile and Export work exactly as for any mark. A folder goes through the batch route.
Getting a clean line from a finger
A finger on glass reports more points than a pen on paper and wobbles between them. Each stroke is thinned to points at least a pixel and a half apart and then smoothed with a short moving average, and the curve is drawn through the midpoints between samples rather than the samples themselves — the same trick a pen’s ink does physically. The stored signature is those smoothed strokes as fractions of their own box, which is why it is as sharp on a 6,000-pixel original as on the pad. Sign larger than you think you need: a bigger signature has less wobble relative to its size.
A signature you already have on paper can be photographed and cleaned up instead, on the image-to-watermark page: the threshold turns the paper transparent and the ink one colour.
Signature watermark versus a legal signature
- A signature watermark is a visible credit on a picture. It is not an electronic or digital signature in any legal sense.
- It does not verify anything: anyone can draw a signature, and anyone can paint one out.
- Do not put your real legal signature on images you publish widely if that worries you — a stylised version of your name does the credit's job as well.
Keeping it on this device only
Nothing about the signature leaves the tab. Ticking “Remember this signature on this device” keeps the strokes in this browser’s IndexedDB so the next visit can use them; unticking deletes them. A recipe saved with a signature mark carries the strokes too, because they are the mark — the same is true of a recipe file you export.
Signature watermark questions
Is a signature watermark a legal signature?
No. It is a picture of a signature drawn on a photograph — a credit, like a painter's signature on a canvas. It is not a digital signature, it proves nothing about who placed it, and it should never be used to sign a document on someone's behalf.
Can I draw it with my finger?
Yes. The pad takes a mouse, a finger or a stylus. Each stroke is smoothed as it is kept, so a shaky line from a finger comes out as a line; a stylus that reports pressure gets a thicker line where you press. Undo removes the last stroke, and the whole pad can be cleared.
Is my signature stored anywhere?
Only if you tick “Remember this signature on this device”, and then only in this browser's own storage, as strokes. Untick it and it is deleted. Without the tick it lives in the tab and is gone when you close it. It is never sent anywhere.