Join photo and signature in one image

One file or two? Read the upload box first

Most recruitment and exam portals ask for the photo and the signature as two separate files, each with its own size limit. Join them only when the form has a single box for a photo with signature, or its notice asks for one image. These examples come from the official pages themselves.

For UPSC, sign three times on one sheet and photograph that sheet, rather than joining separate pictures. For two-file forms, the signature resizer and compress to KB tool make each file on its own.

The 3.5 x 6.0 cm layout in pixels

The pariksha.nic.in guideline describes pasting a printed photo on white paper, signing in a box under it, and scanning just that area. Its sample scan is set at 200 DPI. The first quick layout builds the same thing digitally: a 3.5 x 4.5 cm photo on top of a 3.5 x 1.5 cm signature band.

Centimeters only turn into pixels once a DPI is set. The tool works the pixels out from the DPI you pick and writes that DPI into the JPG, for portals that check it. It rounds the whole image once and gives the signature the rest, so the parts always add up exactly.

A clean signature in a small file

Sign in full with a black pen on plain white paper. The pariksha.nic.in guideline, for one, does not accept initials or a signature in capital letters, because the signature is checked against the one you make in the exam hall.

Whiten the paper turns gray or yellowish paper white and the ink black, which removes the shadow a phone photo leaves. Trim cuts away the empty paper around the signature, so it fills its band instead of sitting small in the middle. The thin line option draws a light rule between the two parts, like the box on a paper form.

Already cleaned it with the signature background remover? Send it here from that page and it lands in box 2.

A phone photo often catches the table around the sheet. The tool looks for the sheet itself, by brightness and by texture, since paper is smooth and a table usually is not. A table darker than the paper, plain or grained, turns white before trimming, even with whitening off, and so does a thin strip of it along the edge of a close photo, unless the signature runs into it. A hard shadow across part of the sheet, such as one from a phone, is cleared too, and the pen lines in it are kept. A signature image you have already cropped close to the ink keeps every stroke, even where the strokes touch its edge. Trim then crops to the whole signature: every name, initial and underline counts, however far apart they are, while specks do not.

We tested this on 284 generated phone-style photos of a signed sheet, on 12 kinds of table from black to off-white or with the sheet filling the frame. Of these, 132 were close photos and 44 had names written well apart. In all but 2, the trimmed result with whitening on kept every stroke and showed none of the table; those 2 were cream paper on a white or off-white desk. We also tested 2,214 signature images cropped close to the ink, from 140 x 60 to 1,600 x 500 pixels with 0 to 6 pixels of paper at the edges, and 180 photos with a hard shadow across part of the sheet. No ink was lost from the cropped images and under 1% from the shadow photos, and every trim kept the whole signature. A desk as light as the paper, or lighter, can be left in, and a real photo can hold things our tests did not. So check the preview. If part of the signature is missing or some table shows, untick Trim, or crop the photo to the paper first. A photo where only the paper shows is still the safest.

In our test, a 276 x 472 pixel join of a CC0 photo from our samples and a test signature on gray paper came to 45.9 KB at JPG quality 95 under the 50 KB limit, and to 19.9 KB at quality 75 under a 20 KB limit. Whitening the paper saved only about 3% at the same quality, so it is the photo, not the signature, that uses up most of the limit. The tool counts 1 KB as 1,000 bytes for the maximum and as 1,024 bytes for a minimum, so the file passes whichever way the portal counts.