Creating a watermark for your photos using Photoshop

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Photographer often have the need to watermark images for various reasons. Sometimes it’s branding while other times it may be to embed a copyright notice. The problem with just embedding plain text is that the text will sometimes blend into the background making it unreadable. In this tutorial, I’ll teach you how to create a text watermark that can be read on any background.

First decide on the design of your watermark. It should be readable but not overwhelm the photo. Keeping in mind the color of your watermark, choose another color that will not blend with your watermark. So if your watermark does not contain blue, make the background in your file blue. This step is only required to make it easier to see your watermark design. This background layer will be deleted later. Click on the background layer and the color picker will pop up. Choose an contrasting color. It does not matter what color.

Create a new file (CTRL-N) and call it watermark. Use a dimension that will more than fit your deign. You can always crop it later. Make sure the background content is changed to ‘background color’ and the color profile is set to sRGB. The resolution (ppi) of this image must also match the ppi of your photos or it will not scale right. Change it here if required. (This is one rare instance where ppi does make a difference in web images)

Now select the TYPE tool by hitting T or selecting it in the tools palette. Pick a font, point size, and font color. I chose to use Trebauchet MS regular at 30 points in white. Type out your watermark. If you want to enter other text like © or year, it’s best to create them in separate text layers so you can change them later. To create separate text layers, simply reselect the TYPE tool after you finish your current text layer by hitting ENTER. I turned on grids to help me align the text. You can reposition the text by selecting the text and moving it by holding down CTRL and dragging it. Save the file by CTRL S.

Now that the text has been created, we need to add some blending effects to offset it from the photo. There is no way to tell what color this watermark will sit on so we need to surround it with another color so it does not blend into a background which may happen to be the same color as the text color. We do this by using the blending options. Right click on the text layer and choose blending options.

You will be presented with this blending dialog.

For the effect we want, you can choose outer glow or stroke. Ultimately, the choice is up to you but the idea is to create some contrast around the text. You can use drop shadow but your watermark will look horribly dated if done wrong. For my watermark, I chose to use outer glow at 50% in gray with a spread of 3%, size of 9 pix, and range of 32%. Play with your settings until you are satisfied. (Note that you have to have outer glow highlighted before you can change the options.)

After the effect is applied, the watermark looks like this.

Now we delete the background layer which was only created to make it easier to see the blending effects. Highlight the background layer and click on the trash below it.