Ok here goes, the most important thing to remember when doing anything new with your pics and any image editing program is to keep your original pics as they are, original and untouched. So with that in mind, make 2 new folders on your desktop and call the first folder 'Pics 2 Edit' and the second one 'Watermarked Pics'. You've done that? Good, lets move on, see...I told you that this was simple. lol


So to start, lets go to your normal pics folder where your unedited pics are stored and find a pic, any pic. A normal unedited digital pic will have a filename something like dsg00789.jpg or P1030252.JPG or somethink similar depending on which camera you use. Select your pic by 'right-clicking', then 'copy', and then paste it into your new 'Pics 2 Edit' folder. If you want to select more than one pic, hold down the 'Control' key and select the pics you want with the left mouse button, then as above, right-click, copy and then paste the new pics into the 'Pics 2 Edit' folder. For the moment lets keep it simple, we'll just use the one pic.




CLOSE THE ORIGINAL PICS FOLDER. We dont want to go near that anymore for the time being. Open the 'Pics 2 Edit' folder, again 'right-click' on your pic, scroll down and rename it to something meaningful, lets say 'glitter-acrylic-1.jpg' Ok, we're done with that for the moment,



All we've done upto this point is make two new folders where we'll be carrying out all our future work, remembering the all important rule to always copy and rename our original images, that way we'll never lose them regardless of whatever mess we might make in Photoshop. lol


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close that folder and start Photoshop, lets make that watermark. Choose 'File/new' and the new document dialog box opens, set your document size to 300 pixels width and 50 pixels in height, its very important that you also set the background to transparent as shown below in fig 1.




Click 'Ok' and your new document appears on screen. use the Move tool shown below (fig 2)



to drag any element around on the workspace, in this case, to bring your document into the center of the screen for ease of viewing. Now we'll put some text in our document, select the 'Type' tool (fig 2) and type out some text, I've just written Copyright, yeah I know, very imaginative. lol




Make sure your type is near enough the height of the document but certainly no bigger than it. You can always adjust this at a later date but for now, bigger text will help you see the blending options that you're going to apply to the text shortly. As it is, I've used a font called Perpetua titling with font size of 45 (fig 4)



You can choose whatever font you like, just remember though, that with the scripts fonts (handwriting types) its very difficult to make any blending options stand out clearly, if you dont want to use blending options, by all means use a script font. By the way, I'll be explaining blending shortly, stop panicking. LOL Something interesting to note here is that as you mess about with different fonts and various font sizes, your 'copyright' text will tend to move about on your document, if you need to reposition it, select the Move tool again, move it and then come back to your text tool, otherwise you'll probably end up with multiple text layers which you defo do NOT want.

Ok, so we've got our document, we've got our text and now we're gonna have some fun with the blending modes. Just in case anyone feels that this is starting to drag out a bit, you will only need to do this stuff once, as soon as you decide a finished copyright look, you can finalise it into your new custom brush, so you guys who were just about to leave, get back here, we're nearly done.


Look over on the right side of your screen (default workspace setup) and you'll see the layers palette (fig 5),






there's only one layer there at the moment, your copyright text layer. 'Right-click' on the layer to bring up the options menu, scroll down and select 'Blending Options' (fig 6)





we're almost done now, hang in there. :-) Move the Blending options menu to one side so that you can see it and your copyright document at the same time (fig 7).



Now tick the boxes as I have, this is a very simple setup, but effective and elegant too.....however that red has to go, yeah? Course it does. simply click on the word 'Stroke' and you'll get some options to alter the stroke settings. Click in the little colour box and change it to a white colour,
click OK to the new colour and then OK at the blending options to close the dialog box. You're back now at your copyright document. One final thing to do with the text is to convert it into a shape, this will allow us to use it at multiple sizes if we need to, very important if you need to make it bigger at a later date, otherwise you'll lose the resolution and sharpness, or to put it simply, it'll look totally naff, trust me. lol Go to your overhead menu at the top of the page, click on 'Layer' and scroll down to 'Type', then over to the right and click on 'Convert to Shape'. Tada!! Dont panic...the text looks a bit ropey, thats ok and it will be sorted in a sec, just ignore it.

Your text is now a shape and can be resized without loss, however it really is a shape now so you cannot edit it after this point, make sure you're 100% happy before the conversion. Anyway, there's no panic at the moment because we're only having a mess here. Incidentally, thats the watermark finished, you can use it now as is. Just open your new nail pic 'glitter-acrylic-1.jpg' in Photoshop, remember that back at the start? Using the Move tool, simply drag the copyright layer on top of the nail pic as shown below.




The copyright layer may be too big or too small depending on what size your nail pic is so you may need to resize it. No problem, press 'control' and 'T' and you'll notice that the copyright layer now has resizing handles. Its important here to hold down your 'Shift' key, and then place your cursor on one of the corner handles to resize. If you dont hold down the 'Shift' key, you'll distort the new copyright layer, see below.





And our final little tweak, we'll reduce the opacity or transparency of the copyright. Look back over at the layers palette on the right, make sure that the copyright layer is highlighted as shown below,





now click in the opacity slider and choose your setting as you watch the transparency decrease on the picture itself. Once you're satisfied with it, its time to save your pic. Choose File/save for web (this may vary depending on what version of PS you use) Remember to save it to your new nails folder that you made earlier, the one called 'Watermarked Pics' on your desktop. You'll notice that your original copyright layer is still there, ready to be used again. So.....open another pic and ...yeah, you get the idea. Away you go. lol

Oh yeah, here's the finished pic, basic but you get the idea.



I'll do a second tutorial later showing how to make a custom brush from this setup, so that you'll only ever need to do this once and you'll have the copyright symbol available at the click of a button. For now though, have a mess with what we've gone through here, get used to the different tools, the menus, the layer pallette and the blending menu.

If anyone has any questions, feel free to jot them down here or PM me.

Have fun!

P.S In the next article, we'll learn how to make a custom brush for our watermark and then we'll have it to hand whenever we need it. Just a click of the mouse and you'll be done. Could it be that simple?

here's the proof - Article 2: Custom Watermark Tutorial