Creating a Watermark Action

I’ve been asked to share my technique for batch watermarking images. This is a technique that saves a lot of time, and basically does the work for you with one click. It places your watermark in the exact same location on all your images, whether they are horizontal or vertical images.

Before you begin, you need to have your watermark already designed and sized to the exact size you want it to be on your websized images. YOu want this to have a transparent background and to be a psd file. Make sure this file IS NOT OPEN.

First, open an image and size it to the exact size you will be using this watermark on. So, if your images on your blog are 400×600, make sure your image you are using for this is that size. It will help you determine exactly where you want the watermark to be placed.

There are two techniques for placing a watermark. You can either use the PLACE command or the PASTE command. PASTE is a few more steps but just as easy. The advantage of the PASTE command is that your sizing of the logo/text remains as designed. I use the PASTE command for this reason.

RECORDING A WATERMARK ACTION
make sure your logo file is NOT open. Open an image.
start recording your new action.

OPEN>select your logo file.

SELECT> ALL>

EDIT>COPY>CLOSE
you should now be back on the image

EDIT>PASTE
change layer opacity to desired strength (I usually put it at 75%)

if you want a drop shadow (I usually like to use one since it helps my watermark show on white/light areas easily instead of only showing in dark areas) then LAYER>LAYER STYLE>DROP SHADOW> I usually put my settings at:blend mode=multiply, opacity at 88, angle 127, use global light, distance=2, spread=25, size=2,
then hit OK

SELECT>ALL

LAYER>ALIGN LAYER SELECTION>chose any of the placement choices, such as bottom edge. if you want it slightly altered from that spot, then use your curser and move it. (so, if you set to be aligned with bottom edge, but want it slightly above the bottom edge, then move it up slightly with your mouse).

if you want to add anoher alignment, you repeat the process. So, for certain things, I do a watermark in bottom right corner. So I first align to bottom edge, then use my mouse to raise it up slightly off the edge. Then I go through it again and align to right edge, then use my curser to move it slightly inside the right edge. by doing it this way, it will align in the same place in your photo (right bottom edge in my example) regardless of whether the image is horizontal or vertical. Basically, it uses the edge as the refernce point which is why it works with both horizontal and vertical. If you were to not use the ALIGN LAYER SELECTION and instead just drag it with your curser, it would be using the center of the image as it’s reference point, and would not be located in the same place on images of different sizes and ratios. That’s why it’s important to align to the edge first, then use your mouse to drag it to your desired location from that edge.

SELECT>ALL

LAYER>ALIGN LAYER SELECTION>choose another additional location if you want/need

LAYER>FLATTEN IMAGE (this is optional)
stop recording

That’s it. See, not difficult, and will save you a lot of time and energy. Stay tuned and I’ll explain how I set up a batch process to watermark and prepare a whole file of images for my blog.

To learn how to process images in batches using this action and others, see this blog post on Batching Images