Saturday, September 17, 2011

How to Watermark Photos and Make an Action in Photoshop

I know there has been some discussion lately amongst bloggers about Pinterest and how to protect your property.  Yes, Pinterest does save the original source and it does send people to your blog, but there is one problem.  In the last week, I suddenly noticed a whole bunch of photos from my blog on Pinterest that were not showing my blog address, but a really weird url, like https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiqLqdj2zizzUj1ffHtzdfoGSSvg52hVlkCJqZEYvPJLKZ-653LrmzjRJB_Rmoj3eR8U34r06_3qs-qCP3X0Ci0zSbdZAqG5nhvGDU7XaZj2l1CvWH2V275K8evPK0lUvZsO-aRMUbXBo/s1600/DSC_0222.JPG.  I think this happens when someone pins an image after clicking it to enlarge in a new window.  I am going to try to start adding a watermark or copyright notation on photos I post (this may not happen all the time) and thought I would try a little tutorial on how to make the process a little quicker.

What is with this weird url?

If you have Photoshop, it is super easy to mark your photos.  You can create an "action" so that after you do each step once and save it, you can apply the action to automatically mark other photos.  If you have a program like Adobe Bridge, you can even batch edit to mark a whole folder's worth of images at once.  *I'm sure there are ways to batch edit with other programs so if you don't have the same program as me, just do a quick search and I'm sure you'll get plenty of results.

Recording an Action to Watermark a Photo in Photoshop
Enlarge for arrows that point to the different tools.
  1. Open up a photo that you want to watermark in Photoshop.
  2. In your Actions window, create a new action.
  3. Name your action.  I chose "Blog Watermark".
  4. Make sure your action is recording.  The little circle at the bottom of your actions window should be red.
  5. Create a text layer and type in whatever you want.  I typed Katie Morris ArtTeacherAdventures.blogspot.com.
  6. Adjust the text arrangement and size.
  7. In your custom shape tools palette, select the copyright symbol.
  8. "Draw" the shape wherever you want it to show up on your photos.  You can either put it in the middle or record different actions for horizontal and vertical photos.  If you put it in the corner on a horizontal photo, it may be cropped when you apply the action on a vertical photo.  Hold down the shift key as you make the shape to keep everything proportionate.  
  9. When you have everything how you want it, stop recording by clicking the square next to the record button.
  10. When you open up other photos that you want to watermark, you should just be able to open your actions window, select the action you want, and hit the play action button. 
*If you have photos cropped to different sizes, it would be a good idea to include resizing to a similar size as part of your action to avoid the watermark being cropped, depending on the desired placement of your watermark.
This bulletin board will look soooo much better after I find time to paint the frame!

Actions are something that I don't utilize as much as I should.  If there are things you do over and over again in Photoshop, consider using actions as a time saver.  Hopefully this was helpful!




8 comments:

  1. This is great! Thanks. I never took the time to figure this out but I love the whole "batch" approach. Makes things alot easier. Thanks for sharing!

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  2. sigh, I wish I had photoshop. Someone stole a bunch of my images from my etsy shop and of course they were not watermarked.

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  3. Thanks for this. I hadn't thought of it, but perhaps I should. Not for my own work as it's masks, but for my daughters photoshop work that I use occaisonally.

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  4. Great idea. I don't have Photoshop either so will need to work out another way of doing this I guess. People who steal images are the worst!

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  5. I never thought of this, though I recently started marking photos in my blogs. Since I don't have Phototshop, I need to figure out a quicker way to replicate watermarks for my photos.

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  6. You may want to check out http://www.watermarquee.com. It's a free online image watermarking tool.

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  7. Very nice trick. I personally use this tool: http://www.paintshoppro.com/en/pages/watermark-photos/ to watermark my photos, and I add a light transparent watermark in the middle of the photo. That way, it doesn't disturb the concept of the photo but it is very hard to remove :)

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