How to make a digital copy of your company seal on iPhone

You have the rubber stamp. What you want is a file: an image of that exact seal you can drop onto invoices, forms and letters from your phone, without hunting for an ink pad every time.

Search the App Store for this and you mostly find seal maker apps, some of them $20 or more. Those apps design a new seal from a template. If your company already has a stamp, that’s not what you need. You need a good copy of the one you have, and an iPhone can make that for free.

A good digital seal has four things: the whole impression (rings, small text and all), the ink’s real colour, no paper behind it (transparent, not a white box), and crisp edges with no grey or white halo. Here’s how to get each one.

1. Make a good impression on paper

The copy can only be as good as the stamp you press, so take a minute here:

Use plain, bright white paper. Printer paper is fine. Avoid lined, cream or textured paper, because every line and fibre becomes something you have to clean off later.
Re-ink the stamp and press on a firm, flat surface, with a magazine or a few sheets under the page for even contact. Press straight down and lift straight up. Rocking it smears the ring.
Make five or six impressions and pick the best: an even, full ring, readable small text, no double edges.
Let the ink dry before you photograph it. Wet ink is shiny and catches light.

A self-inking stamp that’s running dry gives a patchy, grey impression. Fix that with fresh ink rather than trying to repair it in an editor.

2. Capture it in good light

You want a sharp, evenly lit, straight-on image. Two free ways to get one:

The Camera app. Put the page near a window in daylight, turn the flash off (it causes a glare spot in the middle of the seal), and hold the phone flat and parallel to the paper so the circle stays a circle. Tap the seal to focus, then use the 2× lens if you have one and step back a little. That’s sharper than getting close with the wide lens and less likely to cast a shadow of your phone.
The document scanner in Notes or Files (Scan Documents). It straightens the page and evens the light very well. It saves a PDF, not an image, so you’ll still need to get the seal out as an image. A screenshot of the scan, zoomed in on the seal, is the simple free way, but it caps the resolution at your screen’s.

Either way, keep the full-resolution original. You can always crop down later, but you can’t add detail that wasn’t captured.

3. Crop it, then remove the paper

Crop tight around the impression in Photos (Edit, then the crop tool), leaving a small margin.

Then the part that matters most: getting rid of the white. A photo of a seal is a red or blue seal on a white rectangle. On a PDF, that rectangle covers whatever is underneath. What you want is a transparent PNG, where only the ink is kept.

Your free options:

Photos’ “lift subject”. On recent iOS versions you can touch and hold the subject of a photo to lift it out of the background, then Copy it or Add Sticker. It’s designed for people, pets and objects, so it can miss a flat ink mark on paper or cut away part of the ring. Try it, then check the result closely.
A free background remover, in an image editor or online. Seals are usually high-contrast, so these work well. Keep in mind that an online tool means uploading your company’s seal to someone else’s server.
Select-by-colour by hand in an image editor: select the white, delete it, export as PNG.

Whatever you use, save as PNG, not JPG. JPG can’t hold transparency and quietly brings the white back. The longer explanation of why is in how to make a transparent signature PNG. It applies to seals as well.

4. Check it before you trust it

Background removal is where seals usually come out wrong, because a seal is many small pieces that don’t touch: an outer ring, an inner ring, letters, stars, a registration number. Zoom in on the finished PNG, put it over a dark background if you can, and look for:

Missing pieces. Some tools keep only the largest shape and drop the detached letters or the inner ring.
A halo. A thin white or grey fringe around the ink shows up as a ghost outline when the seal lands on a coloured or printed area. Boosting contrast before removing the background (so the paper goes pure white and the ink goes solid) prevents most of it.
The wrong colour. Some tools turn everything into black or grey. A red seal should stay red. If your seal has faded to pink, a small saturation boost brings it back; don’t repaint it a different colour.

If it fails any of these, go back to a better impression or a better photo. That’s faster than repairing a bad cutout.

Doing it with Signed

If you’d rather not do the cut-out by hand, this is one of the jobs Signed does on the phone:

In Signatures, open Seals and scan the stamp with the camera, or import a photo you’ve already taken.
Signed removes the paper but keeps the ink’s own colours. A seal isn’t recoloured the way a signature is, so a red seal stays red. It also keeps the small detached marks that a seal is made of, which is exactly where general-purpose background removers tend to fail.
Crop it and save it. The seal stays on your iPhone, ready to use.

Next time a document needs stamping, the Seal tool places it on the page. That’s the other half of the job, and it’s covered in how to add a company stamp to a PDF on iPhone, including flattening so the stamp can’t be dragged off. Nothing is uploaded along the way: Signed keeps your documents on your device.

Keep the digital seal as safe as the real one

A seal image is easy to copy. Anyone who has the PNG can put it on any document, so treat the file the way you’d treat the stamp in your desk drawer:

Don’t email it around or leave it in a shared folder “for convenience”.
Keep it out of photo albums that sync to shared or family libraries.
Only make copies of a seal you’re authorised to use. Copying another organisation’s seal is a different matter altogether.

Will a digital seal be accepted?

It depends on who receives the document, and it’s worth being straight about that. A seal image shows a document was marked with your company’s seal. It doesn’t prove who placed it, and it isn’t a cryptographic digital seal or a certificate. Plenty of businesses are happy with a stamped PDF. Some want the original stamped paper, and some documents carry their own formal requirements. When in doubt, ask the recipient what they accept. The broader picture for signatures is in are electronic signatures accepted?. Signed is a tool for marking documents, not legal advice.

The short answer

You don’t need a seal-maker app if you already own the stamp. Press a clean impression on white paper, photograph it straight-on in daylight with the flash off, crop it, remove the white, and save it as a PNG. Then zoom in and make sure every ring and letter survived and the colour is right. Or scan it into Signed, which does the clean-up while keeping the colour and the detached marks, and keeps the seal ready for the next PDF.