Adding a Watermark in Photoshop

Learn how to add a transparent watermark to your images with Yanik Chauvin. Yanik's Photo School

Hello everybody, Yanik Chauvin from Yanik’s Photo School here. And today’s lesson is all about creating a watermark to protect your images on the web. Especially if you’re a professional photographer or making some revenue from your images, you want to protect them so that you’re not easily copied and distributed throughout the web for free. Now the first thing we’re going to learn is how to add text and then I’m going to show you how to add an existing logo that you might have. Now first thing we need to do is to get our copyright symbol. And you can get that straight in the Photoshop then you can just go on this icon here which is the custom shape tool. You click on that, the menu bar up here changes, and there’s an option here called shape. As you can see the copyright is already selected, but I’m just going to click on the little arrow here so you can see all the different shapes that are available. And of course, you got the copyright right here which is registered and the trademark symbol as well. And click on that arrow again, select your copyright symbol, there you go. Now we want this to be black, so I’ll click on my color, and select black, and then we also want to have a white border around it. And all you need to do for that is double click, select stroke, color white, and 1 pixel, and click Ok. And next thing we want to do is put our copyright name, I’ll click on the text tool, drag my box, making sure that it’s black, I always put my name but you can also put your company name. You can just put copyright, you can do whatever you want. Click Ok. Bring it close in, it’s pretty small for the size of the shape, but that’s not a problem, it’s not important for this tutorial, double click on my layer. Click on stroke, get the color white, get the pixels down to 1. For the size, click Ok. Now the reason why I went black and then white borders that you might have some images with pure black and pure white in it; and what that will do is I’ll make sure that we actually see all of your copyright watermark on every aspect of your image, and that’s the full proof way to do it. Next thing we want to do is merge those 2 layers together. So holding down the shift key selecting my second layer or as many layers as you want to merge, right click and on that menu, you’ll have merged layers at the bottom here. And as you can see they’ve all emerged into one layer. And then I can move them around like I want, select a place where I want to put this watermark, and the next thing we want to do is to reduce its opacity because we don’t want it in your face, we kind of want it faded in the background, so that the emphasis is still on the image. I usually like to put it down to around 20%. So using the opacity slider of that layer, I’ll bring it down to 20%, or so. And there you go, instant watermark using text and also the custom shape tool for your copyright symbol. Now I want to show you how to do this as well, but with a logo. Now here’s my logo, and if I just drag it in there’s going to be a problem and you’ll see what I mean. There’s all this white around it, so even if I reduce the opacity, it kind of looks silly with the white background. So let me just delete this, and all you need to do, we’ll just grab the logo back up here, is using your magic wand brush, selecting, make sure you go inside the letters as well where there’s some more white, by holding down the shift key you can just add to your selection. I want to keep the white of the logo though, the Y inside the box, and all you need to do after that is go to select, inverse, and then control J to duplicate your layer. And automatically that will delete all the white background. Isn’t that cool? Now selecting your move tool, then you can just drag it down and there you go, you have your logo, and of course this is a bit big, but it doesn’t matter for this tutorial. After that you just reduce the opacity down to whatever you find appropriate for our image, and that’s how you would do that with a logo. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and stay tuned for plenty more. Bye-bye.