One of the first things I wanted to learn how to do as an amateur photographer was how to protect my images from being downloaded and distributed without my permission. Although I consider myself a quick learner and fairly savvy when it comes to learning new applications, I’d heard all the horror stories about how complex and intimidating Photoshop can be for beginners. Needless to say, I was somewhat hesitant and more than a little leery to dive into Photoshop. Fortunately, I soon discovered that all of my concerns were unwarranted, especially in this day and age where software is becoming increasingly user friendly, and YouTube remains the number two search engine for seeking out information on how to do things! A couple of quick searches and browsing through the top results, and I found this wonderful, step by step video on not only how to create a watermark in Photoshop, but also how to create a batch process to apply watermarks to multiple images concurrently.
First things first… Obviously, a watermark doesn’t actually prevent anyone from downloading and using your photos. It’s really just more of a warning, kind of like how those ADT alarm stickers in your window won’t physically stop a burglar from breaking in. A watermark simply lets people know that they better think twice before using your stuff without your permission. To really protect your photos, you should use watermarks in conjunction with other tools such as setting Exif data, and preventing non-approved right-clicks on your website.
If you don’t have Photoshop, don’t worry. Adobe rolled out Creative Cloud a few years ago, which makes it easy and affordable for amateur photographers like us to have access to powerful photo editing tools. Plus, with Creative Cloud, you can try out virtually any of Adobe’s applications for 15-30 days, absolutely free. If you choose to stay with Creative Cloud, you can license the product for as low as $9.99/month. To find out more, click here. I just finished my free trial, and am now paying $9.99/month for Photoshop and Lightroom, and it’s well worth it.
Once you’ve downloaded Photoshop, adding watermarks to your photos is much more simpler and easier than I had imagined. I would recommend you take the following approach:
- Watch the video above first, she’ll walk you through step by step on how to create a watermark. The video tutorial was made for beginners, so you should be able to follow along even if you’ve never used Photoshop before.
- Once you’ve learned how to create a watermark in Photoshop, practice. Create a few test watermarks and fool around with the fonts, drop shadows and opacity levels to find the right settings that fit the watermark you want on your images.
- Watch the video again, and learn how to create Photoshop actions. Photoshop actions are a recording of a series of steps that can then be played back and applied to an image whenever you want.
- Next, create a couple of Photoshop actions for your watermark, one for horizontal images and one for vertical images. Have those actions a) resize the image to a standard size and compression, b) apply your watermark, c) merge the layers, d) save the file, and then d) close the file. If you have your action perform these tasks in this order, it will ensure that your watermarks are always placed in the same position on your images, and that you can use the Photoshop action for batch processes.
- Watch the video one last time, and learn how to apply your Photoshop actions to folders. This will allow you to apply your watermark to multiple images concurrently (while also compressing and optimizing them for web use, if you followed my suggestion in step 4 above), saving you a tremendous amount of time and effort!
What software tools do you use to watermark your digital photos? Do you have any Photoshop tips regarding watermarking and copyrighting your photos that you want to share? Comment back to help our readers!
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