Signatures in Photoshop

I scanned a signature (written in black ink on white paper) that I am trying to place onto a non-white-paper document. How do I format it so that there is not a block of white around the signature on my final document?

You can do a number of things. One, you could use the magic wand to select the white around the sig. The bad thing is that the edges might look a little nasty. Now the other thing you can do is try to match the color of the paper and make a new document and fill the background with that color, then use Darken, Multiply, or Linear Burn on the signature layer. That should do the trick.

Even better, if you are placing in a publishing program, first convert the signature to bitmap (600ppi or above) and save it as a tif. This makes the background transparent. Then if you need to color the signature, most DP programs will let you apply color to a bitmap or grayscale tif.

hmm... i dont think it automatically saves the back ground as transparent.

but i also didnt knwo that TIFFs could even be transparent...as far as i know only GIF and PNG formats support transparency..

a gif would be the way i would go...u could actually do this in something as simple as ms paint....

1) you open the image and save as a GIF.
2) go to Image ---> Attributes.... and then check off the transparency box and set the transparency color to white.

that will preven the jaggedy kind of look that the magic wand will give you..

then resave as a gif.

good lucky and rock on!

You mean you're putting it onto an image that will be printed in something darker than white?

Simply place your signature and set the blend mode (the menu in the layer palette) to Multiply or Darken.