How To: Watermarks

I was recently asked how I put my watermarks on my photos. It's actually a question I get asked a lot and I thought it was something I would share with the world! It's actually quite easy to do with any photo editing software and I'm sure there are other sites who could explain it better, but for those of you here and are wondering...well, here you go!

Ok, first things first. What's a watermark? A watermark in photography shows ownership of a image or piece of media. It's usually a faded image or text that is discreetly placed (and not the focal point of the image) to brand and show copyright to the owner of the image. There are those that say that it defaces the image, but personally I've had my images "stolen" online before, and it's not fun. Now I always make sure to have some kind of watermark on my images.

Now, to the fun part. Here is my original image. It's all edited and ready to be shared on the web. I just need to add my watermark.

There are two ways to go about this: text or image watermarks.

Text Watermarks:

Type out what you'd like your watermark to say. Next, go to your layers, choose your text layer, and change the opacity to something that doesn't interfere with your photo.

 

If you're not familiar with layers, please visit this tutorial on layers. 

Changing your opacity simply makes your text (or any layer) more "invisible," for lack of a better word, lol. The lower the number goes, the more "invisible" your text will become. The higher the number, the opposite!

And there you go!

Image Watermarks

Sometimes, you want a little more umph than what a text watermark can give. I get that!

I created an image I can use as a watermark. I recommend something simple and one, solid color if you're just beginning in photoshop (or any photo-editing software) and play around with it until you get the hang of it, of course. 

I resized it to a size I could use and then simply selected all (ctrl+a or command+a on a mac) and copy (ctrl+c). Then, go to your photo that needs watermarking, and paste (ctrl+v). It should automatically create a new layer for your watermark image you just pasted.

The black isn't going to show up very well when I lower the opacity, so I inversed the image (ctrl+I) to white.

Now, just lower your opacity like before and voila!

Like I said, I'm sure there are places out there that explain it a lot better than I have but I hopefully you've learned a little something today! If you have any questions, feel free to ask here in the comments!