Watermarks

A new version of "The Alamo" will be released this spring. How well it plays next to the John Wayne version remains to be seen. In my workshop dealing with Adobe Photoshop elements, one of the things that we take a look at is my collection of Alamo pictures that I took on a San Antonio visit. After all, where would you get a quality picture of a repair person standing in front of the facade with a ladder!

Given the anticipated demand for quality images, I just might want to ensure that nobody uses my images without knowing where they came from. (Actually, I'd be honoured if anyone looked at them!) A common technique that is used in cases like this is to embed a watermark into the picture. Here's a quick way to accomplish this task.

So, I start with the original picture.

What I'd like to do is to put my name in the stonework in the front right corner of the image.

Blah, boring

If all you need is to put some text on your picture, just do this.

1. Open your image in Adobe Photoshop Elements.
2. Select the Text Tool
3. Pick a font
4. Type your text
5. From the File Menu, choose "Save for Web" and pick a JPG image and you're done.

Quite frankly, the operative word is "done". <grin>

Let's pretend that Doug knows his way around a cursor and add some pizazz to the watermark.

Not blah or boring

1. Instead of starting with black for my colour, I'm going to choose a nice grey from the colour picker.
2. I type my text over the stonework.
3. From the Layers Palette and Layer Styles, I'm going to choose a Bezel type. I used "Inner Ridge".
4. Then, from the Layers Tab, I'll choose a Soft Light for colour blending and then slide the opacity slider until I get the effect that I wish.
5. Now, save that for the web.

The net result is the same. My name get put onto the picture but now it doesn't stick out like a sore thumb. It's just kind of classy!

When all is said and done, these watermarks are just visual text that's blended over the top of your images.

If you're serious about putting a digital watermark to your product, there's some good reading at the Digimarc website.

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