Create signature image with transparent background

greetings Laura leader here with law office solution in this tutorial I want to show you how you can take a scanned image of your signature and save that as a little image file and then later you might use that as your signature inside a Word document inside an email message anyplace you want to make it look like you signed something even though you're really just sitting at your desk so the first thing you want to do is make the scan document so obviously you need something that will scan I recommend using a blue pen so that your image is blue and will look more real and I recommend a fine tip felt pen because that will give you a nice solid line that will be easy for the computer to see Yoda little stand out I didn't have one of those handy I used a different type of pen but I got a pretty decent line here you can see it's not too faint in areas so the first thing you want to do is find a piece paper scan that and then you'll have the scanned item now it may be an image you scan to most likely it'll be a PDF and so I'm going to show you the first step is how if it is a PDF how do would you get that image as an image out of that document I've got it in Word not PDF just because that was more handy for me but it all works the same so let's just pretend like this is in a PDF document and you're looking at it on your computer screen I'm going to go to my Start button in Windows and this will work in Windows 10 or 2007 I'm going to start typing the word snip because that will bring up the snipping tool which comes with windows click that that here's a little snipping tool that popped up now the way you use this I wanted I want to just snip my signature so I'm going to click new everything goes hazy and I will click and drag around the image that I want and as soon as I let go whatever I have selected it copies so it's now copied to memory it's showing it to me here I'm going to why's that now I need to get that into some sort of photo editing software and for this I'm going to use something called paint.net because it's free I'll show you where you can go to get it and it has a really cool tool that will let us make the background of our image transparent so that once you're using it like you can drag it over a line and the line will show through behind your signature so paint.net you can get let me go to their help button and go to their website at www.clemson.edu/peach I do occasionally because it's such a valuable tool to me at any rate so I've got paint.net and I've got it installed right here and I have it open so remember I use that snipping tool when I copied so or it copied my signature so that is up in the computer memory right now all I need to do is paste so I could go in here to edit paste all do paste into new image and that so it will make an image the size of my signature so there it is now for the really cool thing I want the background transparent so there is a tool in paint.net called the magic wand and I'm clicking it here if you don't see these tools if they're not appearing sometimes things seem to disappear in here click the little hammer and it will appear and then you want the magic wand to be on with the magic wand if you just click let me zoom in on this first so we can see it a little bit better all right I'm going to I didn't click it I'm going to click and you can see it outlines the image however in this case it does 50% by default and in this case when I press Delete to get rid of its grabbing all the background so it will not where I clicked it was white so it grabbed everything that was within 50% of that color that was too much you can see it got part of my L here and this is where was a felt tip in you'll have better luck than I am right now but let me undo that and let's tell this that we want a smaller tolerance I'll say 17% and now I've still got the magic wand on and I'm going to click again and you can see it did a much better job so it left a lot more or all my ink behind so I'm going to press delete and that deleted what it grabbed now I also would like to get rid of the white in the loop in my name because if I do drag my signature over a solid line I want the line to show as if I'd really find it by hand so I'm going to click within all these areas and just make sure each time I'm not taking too much and that I'm getting enough and I can zoom in control and roll hold the ctrl key down and roll the wheel on top of your mouse assuming you have one to zoom in and that's good I'm happy with that so now let me just say this as an image so what you would understand free save is an image is only certain types of images can be saved with a transparent background like we have here and one of them that will work in Microsoft Word and other Microsoft programs is called a PNG image stands for portable network in portable network graphics graphics PNG so JPEG you everybody's probably heard of that JPEGs I don't believe can have transparent backgrounds so I'm going to do a save as file save as to save my little image and I will put this I'll just drop it here I want to pay attention to where I'm putting it and I'll say my cig I'll name it and notice it's defaulting to PNG as a type but if it wasn't I would choose that from the list of types to save now it's telling me this is how it's going to save it you know how I don't even know what giving is I mean like maybe I kind of do but I would just go with the defaults as long as it looks okay and say okay now I've saved it now I'm going to jump into Microsoft Word really quick and show you how I could use it but then in a separate video I'll show how you can actually save it so that you can pop it into word anytime you want so I've already got in this document let me just do it new blank document I pressed ctrl n for new on my keyboard so here I am in a document and I want my signature and let's say I've got a line my signature line here love Laura and I'll press ctrl you for underline and tab a couple times to draw a line and then below that I'll write my name we don't want that to be underlined obviously there we go and then I want my signature to go above it and so I could click roughly where I want my signature but it really isn't going to matter where my cursor is because I'm going to just drag the seat over I want it so to get it I would do insert picture and now I here's where I have to remember where I put it usually I would not but I paid attention for all of you and I'll sort by date my cig insert and there it is now it came in let me drop the zoom down a bit for you it came in large I could have changed the size of it in that paint.net editing tool but going from large to small err you usually don't lose any of the quality but going from small the larger you do so I'll just make it smaller here in Word what so the important thing I'm trying to say is when you make your image you want to make sure it's big enough what you save is big enough that you're not stretching it once you put it into programs like word this is also in line with text which means if it's like a character you know I could get in front of it and start typing and it pushed is it if I press ENTER on the keyboard which I just did it pushes it down so it's as if it's like a big character or word within my document I want to be able to drag it around and see how it's all above the line because it's like a character is within a certain spot in the document so I want to right-click my image and go to the wrapping and I want to put it in front of text and see as I move my mouse over these other choices you can see it's showing how it's going to look some people will do behind text and if you sign are white paper and do not have a transparent background you can say to put it behind text and then you can see the part of my name is over words and whatnot doesn't it looks like I actually signed it it's not making the text wrap around it but when you say behind text it's really hard later to click and drag the image it's like hard to get a hold of the picture later so I like to make the transparent background and then say in front of text there it is now I want to make it smaller that's way too big when I have a picture clicked I click off it click on it the formatting ribbon for pictures appears and within there here's the sizing and I will just let's say that I want the height of it to be 3/4 inches the reason I'm going to do it here instead it is dragging is this will keep the ratio the proportion the same so that it doesn't get like really fat looking or really skinny looking it'll keep its proportion so I'll say 0.75 for 3/4 inches then press ENTER and you'll see this is the width that number will change to so it keeps everything in proportion and now I can just drag it where I want and because I have the transparent background you can see if part of my name goes over the line that's okay it looks like I signed it now my next video I'll show you how you can take this and save it as a quick part to pop into a document anytime

Channel: Laura Townsend - Townsendtek

Views: 912,298

Keywords: microsoft word, vba, macros, legal macros, templates, paint.net, signature image, image, transparent

Id: 4PRJd-_iVqQ

Length: 11min 3sec (663 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 23 2017