Most guidance about signature uploads focuses on the digital resizing step — hitting a KB target, getting the pixel dimensions right. This guide covers the step before that: physically capturing a clean signature in the first place. A resizer tool can compress a signature down to the right file size, but it can't fix a faint, shadowed, or smudged original. Get this step right and the resizing step becomes much easier — see our signature resizing guide for what comes after this.

Choosing your pen and ink

Use a ballpoint or gel pen in black or dark blue ink. Black generally scans and photographs with the highest contrast against white paper, which compresses most cleanly at small file sizes. Avoid:

Very thin or dried-out ballpoints that produce a faint, broken line
Fountain pens or fine markers that can bleed or feather on regular paper
Light-colored or non-standard ink colors — some forms explicitly require black or blue ink specifically

Choosing your paper

Sign on plain white, unlined paper — printer paper works well. Avoid:

Lined or graph paper, since the lines show through in the scan and add visual clutter that can be mistaken for compression artifacts
Textured, colored, or recycled paper with visible flecks, which shows up as noise once captured
Paper that's been folded, creased, or has marks near where you're signing

Signing at the right size

Sign at your natural size — the way you'd normally sign a cheque or a form — rather than deliberately signing very large or very small. An unnaturally large signature has to be scaled down a lot, which can lose fine detail; an unnaturally small signature captured at normal camera resolution has fewer actual pixels of signature to work with once cropped and resized. If your form provides a specific box size to sign within, aim to fill most of that box without touching its edges.

Capturing the image: camera vs. scanner

A flatbed scanner and a phone camera can both work well — you don't need a scanner specifically.

If using a scanner

Set the scan resolution to a moderate setting (150–300 DPI is more than enough for a signature) — very high DPI settings just produce a larger file you'll need to compress down further with no quality benefit.
Make sure the paper lies flat against the scanner glass.

If using a phone camera

Place the signed paper on a flat, non-reflective surface.
Photograph from directly above, holding the phone parallel to the paper — an angled shot distorts the signature's proportions.
Use natural daylight or bright, even indoor lighting. Avoid a single overhead lamp that casts a shadow from your hand or the phone itself.
Avoid flash, which can create a glare spot on glossy paper or wash out fine pen detail.

Lighting: the detail most people get wrong

Uneven lighting is the single most common cause of a signature scan that looks "dirty" or blotchy after compression — not the compression itself. A shadow falling across even part of the signature reads as a gray gradient in the file, and gradients compress far less efficiently than flat white background does. Position your light source (a window is ideal) so it evenly illuminates the whole sheet, and check the raw photo for shadows before moving to the resizing step.

Cropping before you compress

Once you have a clean capture, crop it down to just the signature with a small margin of white space — don't upload a photo of an entire A4 sheet with your signature as a tiny mark in the middle. A tight crop means the resizer tool's compression budget is spent on your actual signature, not on large areas of blank paper.

What this guide doesn't cover

This article is about the physical capture step only. For the resizing and compression step that comes after — hitting your exam's exact KB and pixel requirements — see our signature resizing guide and our signature resizer tools.