Photoshop Tutorial: How To Create An Action To Watermark Your Images


Posted: March 6th, 2009 | Author: Jennifer Farley

Adding a watermark to your images can help (but not completely alleviate) theft of your photographs or images. In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to add a simple watermark in Photoshop, align it to the bottom right corner and at the same time create an action that you can reuse for all of your images.

  1. Open up your image that you want to add the watermark to.

    Now before going any further I want to create a new action that will record the following steps.

  2. Open the Actions palette by choosing Windows > Action or press Alt + F9 (win) or Opt + F9.
  3. At the bottom of the Actions palette, click on the New Action icon. This will open up the New Actions dialog box.

    watermark in photoshop

  4. Enter a name for your new action – the obvious one here is Watermark – simple and descriptive. If you want to add your own shortcut key, you can also add that in here. Click Record.  Now Photoshop is recording every step you make.

    watermark in photoshop

  5. Select the text tool and click anywhere on the image.
  6. Add whatever text you want, usually something like © and your name or your website address. Set the size of the font and the colour. I’m using white, size 32pts.

    watermark in photoshop

  7. I like to put my watermarks in the bottom, right corner. To do this, select both the text layer AND your background image layer in the Layers palette. Now at the top of the screen in the Options bars, click on the Align Bottom Edges icon and then click on the Align Right Edges icon. You’ll see that the text you’ve added drops to the bottom right corner of your image.

    watermark in photoshop

  8. Usually a watermark is a semi-transparent image or piece of text so to change the opacity of the watermark, select just the text layer in the Layers palette. Then click and drag the Opacity slider to about 70% (or a lower number if you prefer how that looks).

    watermark in photoshop

    watermark in photoshop

  9. That’s the watermark added and put in place. Now we can stop recording our actions. At the bottom of the Actions palette, click on the stop button. You’ll be able to see all the steps you made listed under the “Watermark” action that you’ve just created.

    watermark in photoshop

  10. The next time you want to add a watermark, all you need to do is open your image and the click on the “Watermark” action in the Actions palette and click the Play icon at the bottom. A good timesaver.

    watermark in photoshop 

Do you add watermarks to your images? Do you use text or images?

Related posts:

  1. Photoshop Tutorial: Create a rubber stamp
  2. Photoshop Tutorial : How to create a simple logo using Photoshop
  3. Photoshop : Tutorial – Eyecatching Text Effect Using Layer Effects
  4. Photoshop Tutorial: How To Create A Vignette or Soft Fade Edges in a Photo
  5. Photoshop Tutorial : Make a Text Clipping Mask

Filed under: All, digital photography | Tags: , | 10 Comments »

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10 Comments on “Photoshop Tutorial: How To Create An Action To Watermark Your Images”

  1. 1 Crystal said at 2:19 pm on March 15th, 2009:

    I have been looking for an easy, yet effective tutorial to follow on creating a water-mark action, so Thank you ! :)

    This tutorial is very easy to follow, so thanks again.

  2. 2 Jennifer Farley said at 8:44 am on March 18th, 2009:

    You’re very welcome Crystal.

  3. 3 Debbie said at 2:09 am on March 30th, 2009:

    Jennifer,
    THANK YOU! Being new to photoshop CS3 is intimidating. Thank you for giving clear and simple instructions.
    With much appreciation,
    Debbie H.

  4. 4 Jennifer Farley said at 1:09 pm on March 30th, 2009:

    Hi Debbie

    You’re very welcome. Glad you found it useful.

  5. 5 Lorelai said at 4:58 pm on April 1st, 2009:

    Hi, Jennifer
    Thank you very much for this tutorial. It’s very easy to follow. Keep up the good work! <3
    ~Lori

  6. 6 Jennifer Farley said at 9:07 am on April 2nd, 2009:

    You’re very welcome Lorelai.

  7. 7 Angela Neil said at 9:07 am on May 16th, 2009:

    Thank you for the step-by-step tutorial – it was very helpful!

    Angela Neils last blog post..Mother’s Day

  8. 8 Barrie said at 8:19 pm on August 21st, 2009:

    Great tutorial!!! How can I do this with our logo instead of just text?

    I really appreciate the help!
    Barrie

  9. 9 Austoon Daily » Photoshop Tutorial: How To Create An Action To Watermark Your Images said at 11:18 pm on September 15th, 2009:

    [...] Photoshop Tutorial: How To Create An Action To Watermark Your Images Comments (0) [...]

  10. 10 Mike Fiechtner said at 8:58 pm on October 20th, 2009:

    I curiuos about the same question as Barrie asked. I have a logo that I have saved as a brush. So I use the brush to add the watermark to my photo. I’d like to be able to add it to the bottom right corner everytime. The other question is how can I scale it so it’s about the same size no matter what size the photo is? I ask because if I crop a photo the dimensions will be different and the water mark would be a lot larger on the cropped photo. Any suggestions would be great! thanks! Great tutorial!
    .-= Mike Fiechtner´s last blog ..Art Teacher For A Day =-.


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