In today’s world where plagiarism and intellectual property theft have been on a high rise, it has become more than important to copyright everything that one does. When it comes to pictures, you can watermark them easily using the Photoshop. So how do you add a watermark using Photoshop? It is a very easy task that doesn’t involve any technicalities of the software. Let us begin.

What do you need?

• Photoshop CS7 (Any version of Photoshop will work)

1. Open Photoshop.

Launch the Photoshop software by double-clicking the icon on your desktop.

2. Create a new document to work with

To create a new document, go to the File menu > New. Choose the desired size of your canvas that you wish to work with. We are going to work on a 600 x 600 pixels size.
Make sure that the ‘Background contents’ is set to ‘Transparent’.

3. Create Your Watermark Text

1. To create your watermark, select the Text tool from the Photoshop toolbox and click on your canvas. Type out whatever you want. You would be using this text to watermark your picture.
2. Transform your text to brush

Watermarking an image is a fairly simple job, and there are various ways to do this. One of the ways is to convert your text to brush. Before you proceed, crop your image to the text size.

To turn the image into brush go to the Edit menu and select ‘Brush Preset’. A dialogue box will appear. Name your watermark brush and click OK when done.

4. Add the watermark

Open the image of your choice to which you wish to add your watermark. To open a new picture Go to the File menu > Open> Select image> hit open. We’re going to use the picture below as an example.

Now, from the Photoshop toolbox, select the Brush tool. Next, you need to scroll down to where your custom brush is present in the Brush Preset. Locate your brush and select it.

Just click the mouse once, where you wish your watermark to appear. Your picture would look something like this.

5. Decrease Opacity

Next step is to decrease the opacity. To do that decrease your brush opacity to somewhere around 25%. Go over to where your watermark is and click there. The watermark would appear much lighter now.

Congratulations! You’ve just added your watermark.

Another way or rather another style of adding a watermark is in the pattern format. In the pattern format the watermark covers, in multiple copies, covers the entire surface of the picture. If that is something you want to do, these are the steps that need to be followed.

Follow steps 1 and 2 till the point where you have added the text to your document.

1. Transform your text

Press the shortcut keys Ctrl+T and drag the corners of your text till it is titled by approximately 45 degrees. Or for ease, you may simply change the angle in the transform tool to -45.00. Enter the value by typing it on your keyboard.

The titled text should look like this:

You may not necessarily tilt it, but it has more of an aesthetic value you can say. The text can be horizontal or vertical or at whichever angle you would like it to be.

2. Cropping and Defining

Just like you did earlier, crop the image to the text size. Leave a little bit of space around, though. Once you are done cropping, go to the Edit menu and select ‘Define Pattern’. Name the pattern and click okay once done.

3. Add the watermark to your image

Take the image that you wish to watermark and create a pattern layer. To create a pattern layer, click on the layers menu at the bottom of the layers panel.

This will open up a dialogue box called Pattern Fill. Select the pattern that you just created from its menu. If you wish to decrease its size, you can change the value in the Scale %.

For the next and final step, select Overlay from the Blend Mode and bring down the Opacity to about 45 to 50%. You can keep the value according to your convenience.

The final result would look something like this:

Now you know how to create watermark using Photoshop. It is nothing more than text editing in a way; playing around with the transparency of your text, if one may like to call it so. So go ahead and protect and safeguard your work.

Things to keep in mind:

1. If you want your watermark to be less transparent, try to use colours other than black and white and play around with the Opacity values. A colour value of 60% grey is a good choice.
2. If you feel like your text might be a bit too big or a bit too small, and you would like to change that, do not fret. You can resize it by using the shortcut keys Ctrl+T. Just keep the Shift key pressed and drag along the corners till you are happy with the result.
3. You can use the copyright symbol too. Use the shortcut keys Alt+0169 to add it to your image.
4. If you’re going to use your watermark again in the future, it is advisable to save it so that you can edit it and use it anytime you would want to.