- 1). Sign a plain white piece of paper with your signature, just as you would a form. Use a scanner attached to your personal computer or accessible by your work computer to scan the piece of paper containing your signature. Save the scanned document to your hard drive or local network as an image file like a TIFF.
- 2). Open the file in a graphics editor like Adobe Photoshop. Crop the image so that it includes just your signature, recommends Bob Brown, a faculty member in the Southern Polytechnic State University's School of Computing and Software Engineering. Use the "magic eraser" or equivalent tool to remove the white background from the image so that your signature appears on a transparent background. Clean up any marks that appear on the image from dust or scratches on the scanner using the eraser tool.
- 3). Choose "Save As" under the File menu. Choose a file location and a name you will recognize. Change the file type to "Photoshop PDF". Click "OK". In the "PDF Options" menu that appears next in Adobe Photoshop, select JPEG encoding, "Save Transparency" and "Image Interpolation", Brown recommends. Use equivalent commands if you utilize a different graphics editing program. Save the signature file.
- 4). Open Adobe Acrobat and create a custom stamp. If you have Acrobat 9.0 Standard, use the "Tools" menu to select "Comment & Markup", then "Stamps", then "Show Stamps Palette". Click "Import", browse to the file you saved locally and select your signature image. Give your stamp a name and designate a category for it. Click "OK" to save your custom stamp.
- 5). Open the PDF document you want to stamp in Adobe Acrobat. Use the stamp tool to insert your custom stamp onto the page. Click and drag the stamp to the signature line or box on your PDF and drop it into place. Save a copy of the PDF containing your digital signature on your hard drive or local network, giving it a file name and location that you will recognize later.