I get asked quite often about how to make a watermark to place on a photo you are going to post online.  I personally like to watermark anything I put out there because I took the time, the gas money, the equipment, and the processing (and the mosquito bites, the sunburn, etc. lol)  to create the image and I don’t want anyone else to claim my work as their own/steal it.  I understand that it’s easy if you know your way around photoshop to remove a watermark from an image, but I figure if someone sees my watermarked image that maybe they’ll move on and try to find something else royalty free online where they won’t have to photoshop out my watermark.

I like to create a transparent .png file of my watermark and save it.  I then drag it onto whatever photo I want to watermark and save a copy to upload to flickr.

* Here’s a tutorial that basically shows what I do when I make my watermark.  She creates hers a little small in this tutorial, but you’ll get the general idea (it’s always better to make your watermark too big than too small.  You can always shrink it, but you’ll lose detail when you try to make it larger).  Check it out here.

* Here’s another tutorial on watermarking in photoshop.

* Now, The Coffee Shop has a great tutorial up on their blog today about creating a watermark brush.  She shares a ton of good info here (even one of my favorite sites for fonts!), this is another way to go instead of creating a png file.  You just create the brush and ’stamp’ your watermark onto any image you need it on!  Check out her tutorial here.

These tutorials should start you off in the right direction with creating your own watermark.  In the beginning, don’t worry about creating a fancy schmancy logo.  Just start out with your name and at least put that on the photo.  Then, down the road you can decide if you want to create your own logo.