Watermarking Your Pictures

You've seen them all over the place, from the world record screen shots of seasoned over-clockers to the photographs of profesional photographers. The semi-translucent name of creator of the image...A watermark.

Watermarks are used to protect picture's from being copied, and having someone else claim it's their picture. Watermarks typically state the creator of a picture's name or alias. They are typically transparent enogh to allow the under lying image to be seen completely, but dark enough to prevent someone from copying the image and claiming it's theirs. Some watermarks are not translucent, and instead are completely opaque, others are images, even images with some text. It's really based on personal preference on what kind of watermark you should use.

Now onto the guide. There will be two version of this guide. A step by step picture guide, and a video guide that will be hosted on an external sever. The first part will be the picture guide, with the links to the videos following. (For this guide, I will be using Adobe Photoshop CS2, you can download the trial here)

The first step would be to open the picture you wich to be water marked, this can be done by going into the "File" menu and selecting "open", then navigating to your file, once your picture is found and selected, hit the "open" button in the dialog box.

Now that we have our picture open, we need to create an aditional layer to the picture.Do this by going into the "Layer" menu, then new, then layer. This can also be done by hitign Shift+Control+N. Once you have added the new layer, you are given the option of naming it, you can leave it as is or change it to your hearts desire. Once you have named the layer, simply hit the "Ok" button.(the purpose of having "The Gimp" open is to save and edit screen shots...)

Now that we have our new layer created, we will want to hide the main layer or "background" in our case. This is done by simply clicking on the little "eye" to the left of the word "background" on the righ hand panel.

Now that we have our "blank" layer visible, you can add your water mark to it, We will show the basic water mark, text with your name. To add the text, click the "T" on the right hand tool panel, position where you want the text to be entered on the layer, then up on the upper tool bar, select your text formatting options, such as font type, font size, bold, italics,etc..If you find the font to small, you can highly the size in the tool bar, hit backspace to delete the numbers and enter your own. You can also change the color of the text by highlighting it, then going over to the right hand panel and adjusting the R-G-B sliders.

Once you have your text inputed and the position of it adjusted, it's time to reactivate the "background" layer, like earlier, click on the empty box to the right of the word "background" on the lower half of the right hand panel. You will immediately notice that your text is now on your main picture.

Now that we have our text on the main picture, we now need to adjust the text's opacity, or how see-through it is. Navigate over to the lower end of the right hand panel, you see the layers, the "Watermark" layer and the "Background" layer, double click the "Watermark" layer, but not the layer name itself. A new window will pop up display quite a bit of options and information.

For simplicity's sake, we will only be paying atention to the two upper most sliders. The control the "watermark" layers opacity. Feel free to experiment around with the sliders, get the watermark as translucent or opaque as you like.

Once that is done, hit the "Ok" button, then navigate over to "File" in the menu and click "Save As". Choose the location you wish to save the picture, and give it name. Before you hit save, make sure you change the file type to JPEG with the drop down list in the "Save As" dialog box.

Once you hit save, you will be presented, yet again, with another dialog box titled "JPEG Options". This dialog box allows you to set the image quality with a slider or from preset options in a drop down list. 1 Having the smallest file size with the least quality, 12 having maximum quality with the greatest file size.

Once you hit "Ok" and the file saves, you are free to exit photoshop and upload your image(s) to your upload site of choice and show the world your world record overclock or your new precision detailed car that just came out of the shop:)

Videos

High Quality (H.264 encoding, download provided RangerXLT8 with his rapid share account--30.8MB)
Low Quality (Plays in web browser with flash player--~20MB)
You must have the latest Apple QuickTime installed to watch H.264 encoded videos, you can download the standalone player here.