# How to Photograph an Embossed Seal So It Shows

- Author: Schema Law (https://www.schemalaw.com/)
- Published: 2025-06-17T22:16:46Z
- Updated: 2026-10-11T19:22:20Z
- Category: Phone scans and photos
- Canonical: https://www.schemalaw.com/blog/how-to-photograph-an-embossed-seal

> How to photograph an embossed seal on a notarized or certified page: light it from one low side, take a second evenly lit picture for the text, and note it.

To photograph an embossed seal so it shows, darken the room and light the page from one side with a single lamp held low, almost level with the paper. The raised ridges catch the light and throw small shadows, and the seal appears. Take a second, evenly lit picture of the same page for the text.

## Why does an embossed seal vanish in a scan or photo?

An embossed seal vanishes because it has no ink. It is the paper itself pressed into ridges and hollows, the same color as the sheet around it. A scanner or a camera records differences in brightness, and under flat, even light a raised white ridge is exactly as bright as the white paper beside it.

Your eye finds the seal on the original because you tilt the page without thinking, and the ridges catch the ceiling light. A capture device does the opposite of tilting:

- **A flatbed scanner** lights the page from directly underneath, close to the sensor's line of sight, and the lid presses the relief flat against the glass.
- **A sheet-fed scanner** squeezes the page between rollers and lights it the same way.
- **A phone with its flash on** lights the page from right beside the lens, so every shadow falls behind the ridge where the camera cannot see it.
- **A scanning app's filter** then pushes the paper toward pure white, removing whatever faint shading was left.

The result is a clean page with a blank corner where the notary's or the clerk's seal should be. Nothing is wrong with the copy as a record of the words. It simply does not show that the seal exists.

On a notarized pleading, save the side-lit photograph next to the even one. The first shows the seal, and the second is the page you use to get the text out. If you keep the pair as documentary evidence, label them with the page and the date so authentication can tell them from a later scan in the chain of custody.

## How does raking light show a raised seal?

Raking light shows a raised seal by coming from one side at a very low angle, so that each ridge is bright on the side facing the lamp and shadowed on the other. Those paired light and dark edges are something a camera can record. The lower the lamp, the longer the shadows and the clearer the lettering.

You need one small light source and a dim room. A desk lamp, a flashlight or a second phone with its flashlight on all work.

1. Lay the page flat on a dark, matte surface. Do not put glass or a weight over the seal.
2. Turn off the overhead lights, or shade the page from them. Turn off the camera's flash.
3. Hold the lamp to one side of the seal, a hand's width or two away, and lower it until it is nearly level with the paper.
4. Watch the seal while you move the lamp slowly around it in a circle. Stop where the wording is easiest to read.
5. Hold the camera directly above the seal, square to the page, close enough that the seal fills a good part of the frame.
6. Tap to focus on the seal. If the picture looks washed out, lower the exposure until the shadows are distinct.
7. Take three or four frames with the lamp at slightly different heights and directions.

### Getting a better result

- **Try more than one direction.** Lettering that runs around a circle is lit well on the parts that cross the light and poorly on the parts that run along it. A frame lit from the left and a frame lit from the top, kept together, cover the whole ring.
- **Use a window if you have no lamp.** Put the page on a table beside a window with the room lights off, and turn the page until the seal stands out.
- **Leave the paper alone.** Do not shade over the seal with a pencil or press it to sharpen the impression. Either one changes an original document.

## One picture for the text and one for the embossed seal

A page with an embossed seal needs two exposures: one under flat, even light for the words, and one under raking light for the seal. The lighting that reveals the seal is poor lighting for text, because it also brings up paper grain, creases and fold lines as shadows across the lines of type.

Take the text picture first, the way you would photograph any page: even light from both sides, the whole sheet in the frame, no flash glare. That is the picture to convert to text. Then, without moving the page, switch to the single low lamp and take the seal picture.

A fictional example shows how the pair is filed. Lucia Ferrant, a paralegal, receives an original affidavit sworn by a witness named Gordon Pell. The notary's embossed seal sits at the lower left of page three, partly over the notary's signature line. She files:

| File | Lighting | What it is for |
| --- | --- | --- |
| `Pell_affidavit_p3.jpg` | Even, both sides | The readable page, used for conversion to text |
| `Pell_affidavit_p3_seal.jpg` | One lamp, low, from the left | Shows the embossed seal and its wording |
| `Pell_affidavit_p3_seal_context.jpg` | One lamp, low, whole page in frame | Shows where on the page the seal sits |

The third picture is worth taking. A close-up proves a seal exists somewhere, while a whole-page frame under the same light ties it to this page and this signature.

If the pages go into a single PDF, put the seal pictures directly after the page they belong to and say so on a cover note, so that nobody counts them as extra pages of the affidavit. Whether a photographed or scanned copy can stand in for the sealed original at all is a separate question that depends on who is receiving it. The post on a [scanned copy of a signed contract](https://www.schemalaw.com/blog/scanned-copy-of-a-signed-contract) covers when the paper original is still asked for.

## Can OCR read the wording inside an embossed seal?

Expect OCR not to read the wording inside an embossed seal. Under flat light there is nothing to read. Under raking light the letters are made of highlights and shadows, they run in a circle, and part of the ring is dim. Treat any text returned from a seal as a guess to be checked.

This is a limit of the material, not of one tool. Schema Law's own [answers to common questions](https://www.schemalaw.com/#questions) say that recognition "is strongest on clean print and weaker on faint faxes, stamps over text, and handwriting," and that nothing marks a passage as uncertain. A seal with no ink is not clean print.

So record the seal by hand. Read it from the original under the lamp, and add a bracketed note to your working copy of the text at the point where the seal sits:

```text
[Embossed seal, lower left of page 3, partly over notary signature.
Outer ring reads: "A. N. EXAMPLE NOTARY PUBLIC". Centre reads: "STATE OF ...".
Read from the original by LF on 2 March. See p3_seal.jpg.]
```

Fill in what you can read with certainty and mark what you cannot, for example "two letters illegible." A note like this makes the seal findable by search, tells the next reader that it was checked against paper, and points to the picture that shows it.

## Foil seals, ribbons and inked seals beside the embossed kind

Foil seals, ribbons and inked seals each need different handling from a plain embossed seal. Foil reflects the lamp, ribbons stand off the page, and ink is visible under ordinary light but can cover the words beneath it. Identify which kind you have before you choose the lighting.

| What is on the page | What goes wrong | What to do |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Plain embossed seal | Invisible under even light | Raking light, plus a second picture for the text |
| Embossed gold or red foil sticker | Glare patch hides the impression | Move the lamp until the reflection slides off the foil, then lower it |
| Ribbon under a seal or through eyelets | Scanner feed or lid can crush or tear it | Photograph from above without flattening, and never detach it |
| Inked rubber stamp | Shows well, but may sit on top of text | Photograph normally and check the words under the ink |
| Embossing over an inked stamp | Ink shows, relief does not | Both pictures, as for a plain embossed seal |

Foil is a reflection problem before it is a relief problem. The method for finding an angle where a shiny surface stops mirroring the lamp is set out in the post on [photographing a laminated document](https://www.schemalaw.com/blog/how-to-photograph-a-laminated-document). Once the glare is off the foil, the same low side light brings up the pattern pressed into it.

Inked seals are the opposite case: the camera sees them easily, and the difficulty is the text they overlap. That is covered in the post on [whether OCR can read stamps over text](https://www.schemalaw.com/blog/can-ocr-read-stamps-over-text).

Apostilles and certified court copies can combine several of these on one page. Photograph the whole page evenly first, then work through each feature with its own close-up, and list them all in one note.

## Try it on a real document

Upload a scanned PDF and export it as Word, a searchable PDF or plain text on the free plan. Your documents are never used to train an AI model. [Start free](https://www.schemalaw.com/api/auth/google)