It has been a week since I did my last tutorial, and from what I gather, I did an okay job of it. Most people seemed to understand it.  I will also add another page across the top so you can go back to any if you want to.  However, today, as promised, I am going to show you how to apply a simple watermark to your images.

There is a lot of discussion about watermarks, should you, or shouldn’t you use them.  I think it all has to come down to you and how comfortable you feel about the possibilities of someone nicking your work.  I want to protect my work, and it doesn’t take a lot of effort to do it, so why not.  I know it won’t stop anyone who really wants the image, but it will deter a lot.  So the next question is how?

I have used Adobe Photoshop CS6 for this, but seriously, most of this you should be able to use with most image manipulation software.

First of all you open your image.  I thought I would use one of the images from the dress rehearsal of the last play.  You also need to make it smaller, well, I always reduce the size of my images, it means that it is easier to upload them to my blog and means that you don’t have to wait forever for the images to download when you are looking at them.  It also means that if someone wants to steal your image, then they only have access to a low res version of it.

So you have your image the size you want, now you need to add a new layer.  You want the layer to be transparent.  You can click on the “Create a new layer” at the bottom, just follow the yellow lines, or you can go up to Layer in the Menu and click new layer there.

Once you have your transparent new layer you can click on the text (T) tool on the left, circled in yellow and type what you want to have on your image.  I just typed my web address, I did it in white so it would stand out, but you could choose another colour.  You can also change the font and the size if you want as well.  I just picked something basic.

So the watermark doesn’t stand out so much, I then reduce the opacity of the layer.  How far down you go is really a matter of preference.  How strong you want it to be, but be careful. watermarks are distracting on the image and many people don’t like them.  If you are going to watermark your work, be prepared for the people who don’t like them.

This is a different watermark, but is done almost the same way as the other one, the main different is that instead of using the text tool, I used the paint tool and wrote my name with my Wacom Pen and Tablet.  then I reduced the opacity of it.

This is yet another way to do it, after adding my new layer I increased the font size and put my watermark right over the top of the image, using the text tool.  Again, I used white because it stands out.

Next, with the layer highlighted, I went to the layer menu, clicked on Layer Style, then clicked on Bevel & Emboss…

The above window came up, I left everything as it was on this and click on the Blending Options: Default.

Once you have clicked on that option, then you go to the Advanced Blending and Fill Opacity and take the slider to zero.  Hopefully you can see that in the above image.  You will notice that your watermark has a bevelled appearance, but it is clear, and you can see through it.  Then you click OK.

There is your final image.  You can still see the image, but there is a watermark right across it.  I don’t know about this one, that is the size, but I do like the effect.

All of these were very easy to do.  Of course you can do them with no image, just start with a transparent new file, then do all the other steps and save them, I save them as a photoshop file so I can change them any time, then when I want to put the watermark on the image, I just select all, copy and then paste it onto the image I want to use.  I have trouble saving the watermark as anything else, I don’t know why, I need to investigate that, there are so many tutorials out there on how to do this.

This tutorial will, hopefully, be very helpful to all those that have asked me how I watermark my images.  It really is quite easy.  Good luck.

I am thinking of doing some more basic editing next week, cropping, resizing, and levels, I hope it isn’t going to be too basic for you.