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com/photoshop-watermark/
Kasia Mikoluk
To watermark or not to watermark: many a photographer has grappled with this
question. Watermarked images look decidedly ugly, but in this age of plagiarism, is also
a rock solid way to prevent unauthorized use. Fortunately, creating a watermark itself is
pretty easy, as we will learn in this tutorial below.
There are multiple ways of creating watermarks in Photoshop. Below, we will take a look
at two popular methods, followed by the proper way to add watermarks to a batch of
images. For more in-depth tips and tricks on using Photoshop, take this Photoshop
video quickstart guide.
Open Photoshop and create a new document. Make it whatever size you like. I
personally prefer something at least 600 x 600 pixels in size. Make sure that you select
‘Transparent’ in ‘Background Contents’.
2. Create Your Watermark Text
This is pretty straightforward. Use the Type tool to create your watermark text. Make it
as large as you want your final watermark to be.
There are many different ways of creating a watermark. One of these is to turn your text
into a brush. To do this, first crop the image to the size of your text:
Now
we need to turn this image into a brush.
Go to Edit -> Define Brush Preset. In the dialog box that pops up, give a unique name to
your watermark brush and hit ok.
Your image is now a brush that you can use with the brush tool to ‘paint’ your
watermark.
Now open the image that needs to be watermarked. For this example, we’ll use this
image:
Select the ‘Brush’ tool ( ) and from the brush presets menu, scroll down and select
the preset you just created.
You’ll now see your brush cursor change to your watermark image.
Before you can create the watermark, you’ll have to change the brush color. It’s best to
use either black or white, though I personally prefer white.
All you have to do now is click the mouse once where you want the watermark to be,
like this:
That’s because we haven’t changed the brush opacity. Lowering the opacity to around
25% in the brush attributes menu bar will give us that nice watermark effect.
Tap the mouse over the image. The effect is far more pleasing now.
Congratulations, you’ve successfully created a watermark!
Want to create more complicated Photoshop image effects? Check out this tutorial
to create a vampire in Photoshop!
But what if you want one of those ‘patterned watermarks’ you see floating around on
the internet. The process is easy enough, as we’ll see below:
Hit CTRL + T and drag the corners of the text until it’s tilted by about 45 degrees. You
can also enter -45.00 under ‘angle’ in the transform toolbox at the top:
As before, crop the text. Don’t crop it too close – leave a bit of margin otherwise our
watermark will look too squished together.
Once done, go to Edit -> Define Pattern. Give the pattern a name and hit OK.
Create a new Pattern layer from the new layer menu at the bottom of the Layers panel.
In the ‘Pattern Fill’ dialog box that pops up, select the pattern you just created. You can
shrink it down to a desired size by dragging the ‘Scale %’ slider.
Your watermark is now visible over the image, but it doesn’t look quite right.
To make it look better, select ‘Overlay’ under ‘Blend Mode’ and drag the opacity down
to ~50-60% in the Layers panel.
That’s pretty easy as well, thanks to Photoshop’s ‘Batch’ tool and macros.
2. In the window that pops up, click on the folder icon to create a new folder that will
hold all our watermark actions.
Once you hit ‘Record’, the macro will start recording. You should see a red button in the
actions window.
6. Create a watermark using either the brush or the pattern method as described above.
Once done, hit the ‘Stop’ button in the actions window.
The actions window should now show a list of actions you performed to create the
watermark, as can be seen in the screenshot above.
7. Go to File -> Automate -> Batch to add the watermark to a whole folder of images.
Now that you know everything about creating watermarks in Photoshop, it’s time to
learn a few more tricks. Take this course on Photoshop fundamentals to get up to speed
with Photoshop tricks and concepts.