Build a watermark in your photos using Adobe Photoshop

Sample
There are many cases that you have to include large fotos in your site, but you do not want others to download them and use them. The easy way to protect your work is to write your name in front of the photo, so it cannot be used, but it does not look nice, does it? The more professional and nice-looking option is to build a watermark in your photos. Your work will look like the card from our store above. Let’s see how you can build this watermark with Adobe Photoshop (7 or later).

  1. Open the photo that you want to put the watermark on and choose the custom shape tool.
  2. From the option panel, choose the shape thumbnail and choose the Copyright symbol.shape2
  3. Create a new layer on top from the others and press d to choose black as the foreground color.
  4. Draw the Copyright Symbol on your photo (with the custom shape tool) and place it where you want.
  5. From Filter menu choose, Stylize>Emboss and apply the filter with Angle=135, Height=3 or 5 pixels and Amount=100% .Emboss
  6. Click the lock transparent pixels in the layer palette.lock
  7. Go to Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur choose radius=3pixels and click ok to apply it.Hard Light
  8. Now choose the layer with the copyright symbol from the layer pallete and change the blending option from Normal to Hard light to make the watermark transparent (like above). Play with the opacity, so the watermark looks nice to your eyes.lock3
  9. Choose the Type tool, write what you want under the copyright logo and right click on the text layer>rasterize type.Type
  10. Apply the same effects to the text layer (step 5 to 8)!

11 thoughts on “Build a watermark in your photos using Adobe Photoshop

  1. @santaru: the copyright symbol is in special characters. ฉ here it is, so you can copy and paste it from here if you can’t find it ๐Ÿ˜‰

  2. Hi Nikos,
    May I ask, how do you put the same watermarks on many pictures… so that I don’t have to do the same step over and over again for every single picture file?
    I tried copy and paste the layer style, but it didn’t work.

    Thanks a lot

  3. @Josephine: There is an option in photoshop, where you can push record and record the operations you make on an image. It is called Automated Operations. Record the steps to create the watermark and then open the other images and choose the automated operation you record. The watermark will be applied automatically. If you need further instructions, email me ๐Ÿ™‚

  4. Great job explaining this! I had gone to several sites and none of their directions were clear to me. Thank you, you’ve made my day!!

    1. jpg is the way to go if you want small files and nice looking images. you should use .png (larger file size) if you want transparency in an image (for example a logo that needs to blend with the background and should not have white background). jpeg does not offer transparency.

Leave a Reply to Azfarul Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.