Digitizing Signature Question

I’m trying to create a brush that is a copy of my signature. I watched a video of how to do this in Affinity Photo 2, and I got it to work, almost.

1. I took a photo of my signature on a white piece of paper, and I used blue ink (which might be the problem). I honestly wasn’t sure what to select for my layout, but I went for one that was meant to be printed. I thought I would try 500 x 500 pixels and 300 dpi with no background.

2. I placed the jpeg image and sized it (I could have gone bigger, but that’s not the issue).

3. I used levels to take out any paper texture and brighten the background to white.

4. I then used channels, selected red, and I believe used a right click on my mouse to bring up pixel selection. Everything was black, but there was another step in that same menu that brings everything back to my blue signature and white background and my signature selected. Yay!

5. I created a new pixel layer, and then used a brush to paint in the selected signature in black. Looked good to me!

6. I then saved my signature as a png file.

7. Next I used that png file to create a new intensity brush. And then I just edited it so that the brush was spaced out.

When I tested it, I got my signature, but I also noticed that there seemed to be a lot of stray pixels on the brush. As I moved my brush over the area to be stamped, it looked like a cloud of bubbles surrounding my image, but it seemed fine after I stamped my signature. However, when I looked closer I could see a lot of stray pixels. They weren’t really obvious at first.

I tried erasing them, but of course, that kind of defeats the purpose of creating the stamp. Can anyone tell me what I might be doing wrong? I did one for my husband’s signature, and he used black ink. His seems fine, although I believe there might have been just a couple of extra pixels, yet far less than mine.

I got this from a tutorial on YouTube, but it didn’t go into creating a stamp. I want this for some Christmas cards I make in Affinity, so we don’t have to keep signing them, but it looks like we did!!

Here’s a link to the video. He doesn’t create a stamp.

I guess one thing I could do is clean things up before converting to a png. It starts out as a jpeg because we’re both writing on paper. I wanted it to look realistic, and I can’t get that when I write on a screen.

Thanks for your response, Alfred!

Quote from Alfred

Your stray pixels must have been part of that selection. You need to tidy up the selection before exporting to PNG for the brush image.

After I sent this I tried it again. I created a new pixel layer, and this time I zoomed in and used a smaller brush. Last time I used a much larger one, and thought I was just getting the signature. It looks a little fuzzy on my screen shot, but perfect on my card. The signatures actually look real!

Quote from Felix

Oh yes, that looks very realistic – how did you manage to make it look like it was done with a real pen?

Thank you! We both wrote our signatures on a piece of white paper. Then I took a picture with my cell phone.

I'm having trouble with arthritis, and my husband says he is, too. It's really frustrating just signing my name once, so thought I'd do my best (it took several tries), and then create a stamp for cards. It helped that I changed the stamp color to blue.

I never would have figured it out if I hadn't found the tutorial.