Quick Tip: Automated Watermarking With Photoshop
People have mixed opinions over watermarking photographs, and whether it’s really necessary. The fact remains that it’s a good way to prevent your images being copied without attribution and many photographers find it incredibly reassuring. Although several photo-management apps such as Lightroom and Aperture have in-built watermarking functionality, today I’ll be showing you how to quickly automate the process in Photoshop!
Step 1. Choose Your Watermark
When I do choose to watermark images, I go down the route of a simple written copyright notice in the lower corner of a photograph. It’s possible to do far more advanced and thorough watermarking, but I feel this often distracts from the image itself.
The first step is to choose the text you’d like to be replicated on each image. For my example, I’ll be using Copright © David Appleyard
Step 2. Open and Resize a Photo
Next, open a sample photograph in Photoshop and resize it to the dimensions that you most commonly work with. I’m going with 800px wide.
Step 3. Start Recording a New Action
We’ll be using Photoshop’s “Actions” panel for this. It should be visible towards the right of your screen – if not, click Window > Actions to show it. We want Photoshop to essentially record the steps we make from this point on, to be able to replicate them in the future.
To create a new Action and start recording, click the “New” button and give your action a name. From this point on, be sure to only follow the instructions given here, and don’t click anything else!
Step 4. Type & Format Your Watermark
The next step is to type your watermark, as you’d like it to appear on every photo. When you’ve done that, format the text to look as you’d like – bold, italic, colour, opacity etc. When done, click another tool to finish editing the text layer.
Step 5. Position the Watermark
I’m going to assume that you’d always like the watermark to appear in the lower right corner of the image. To do this, take a look at the Layers palette and select both your photography and text layer (Ctrl-Click or Command-Click both layers to select them both).
Then, look to the top menu and select Layer > Align >Right Edges, followed by Layer > Align > Bottom Edges. Your watermark should snap to the lower right-hand edge. You’ll probably want a little padding, so proceed to select only the text layer, then just nudge it 20px left and 20px up with your keyboard arrow keys.
Step 6. Stop Recording
You’re all done, so click the square button just below your current Action to stop the recording process. You should now be left with an Action that you can re-use time and time again! Just open an image and hit the “Play” button. If you’d like to automate the process for a folder of images, you can do so using File > Automate > Batch.
Have fun, and do share your own methods and tips for watermarking in the comments!
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Absolutley brilliant! Thanks!
Thanks for the tut but i have a question (problem) the images not being displayed
Thanks for the share. I have a problem that the images not being displayed here.
How do you set up the settings in batch automation if you want it to automatically save all of the images into a folder without doing each one individually?
For that purpose I ended up with using “JAlbum” instead of Photoshop, which is a small software for making Flash galleries. But I often use it just to resize and watermark images in a very time-saving way. You can simply drag your pictures into the window, hit a button and it produces two folders – one with the size you´ve chosen (800 px wide for example) and all watermarked and one with thumbnails of a chosen size.
Before you stop recording the Action, just save the image to the folder you’d like to use (without changing the name). Then, when you run the batch process, each image will be saved.
Awesome. Thanks guys!
hey, i’ve got a quick question. after i align the layers, the last letter of my name touches the edge of the picture.
how can i avoid this?
just by dragging the layer to the left? i’m afraid it’d screw the alignment if i’m batch watermarking a lot of pictures that include both landscape and portrait orientation…
i also tried typing a space after the name but it didn’t work.
Very cool. I just used this the other day right before this article came out. Definitely saves some time when needing to a whole batch of photos.
Thanks
So simple and easy! A long time ago I was getting a big headache because of watermarks… something like “how to align it perfectly at the top left corner whether the picture is in portrait format or in landscape format?” In that time I didn’t know about Align options… Luckily I haven’t done it since then but now I know a way of doing it!!!!
I’m a webdesigner and for web images (repeat, for web images) I use a PHP that watermark photos automatically. It’s a faster way and save some minutes (or maybe hours) from watermarking hundreds of photos in Photoshop. It’s good for blog images or non-flash photographer portfolios.
Thanks for this post!
Thanks David for this great time saver it works a dream
chris.
on my iMac I get an error:
The command transform is not currently available.
I am just trying to resize the image. It seems as though on the laptop I don’t have this problem.
Thanks for this. Life saver. I have been pulling my hair out trying to work out how to get the layer in the same place on multiple images!
This DOES NOT work for images of different sizes. I’ve tried it with images that are different sizes, and the action aligns the signature to the bottom right corner, then nudges it up 20 pixels, and to the left 20 pixels. It ends up being in different spots on the images – can someone please help me find a TRUE solution to the issue of not being able to batch ‘copywright’ images of all shapes/sizes/resolutions? I really hoped this would work…
Ah! Align edges…. this is what I hadn’t thought of! I couldn’t work out how to keep the distance from the corner consistent even on different image sizes, but align works a treat. Thanks so much.
MUITO BOM!
excellent man….!!