Automatically add a watermark text or logo in Photoshop

Hello it is time for actions. In particular we're going to create watermarks. So we're going to record our custom owned action. Click on it, and just hit 'Play'. Then it's going to add our watermark of our author right in the middle there. We can do it over and over again on every image. We can also do it with logos. So I've got one here that we make in this particular video on logos. Goes in the bottom right. Bottom right, super quick, super easy, saving you loads of time. We love actions. Let's go. 

Let's get started by opening up our 'Exercise Files'. You'll find them in the 'Exercise Files', under '03 Preferences and Workflow'. Let's open up 'Image 1', '2', '3', and '4'. We'll start with 'Image 1'. Let's quickly look at what actions are, if you haven't used them before. Let's got to 'Window', and go to 'Actions'. Basically all they are is steps in Photoshop that somebody else has recorded. You'll see here, like there's one here for a vignette. If I twirl it down it just means, just going through steps in Photoshop, is take a snapshot, add a feather, make a copy of the layer, fill it, all these steps are just recorded in here. So you can use some of the default ones. These haven't been updated since like-- it feels like the 90s, if we click on 'Wood Frame' and hit '+', it says it has to be that big, it's okay, and you get a very 1990s wood frame around the outside. You might love it, and there you go, just click on that button. You can see over here, we've got kind of images, the frame could be turned off. 

Basically somebody before us has created this wood frame. Recorded it, saved it as the default ones in Photoshop. I'm going to go to 'File', 'Revert', that's going to go-- there's just too many undos, that's probably happened. So if I revert, it goes back right back to the beginning. So you can play around with these ones, there's a few more in here. There are some, say 'Text Effects'. Scroll up here, this panel is a little bit hard to use, I won't lie to you. And the easiest way is to say, twirl up the default ones. Grab some text. Dan. Move Tool, you can see it's got type there, means that this one needs to have a Type Layer selected. And if I hit 'Water Reflection', and hit 'Play', it's going to give me a kind of a Ripley watery effect, and you can see, they're all separate layers. Some of them are kind of cool, and lots of them aren't. 

So let's look at making our own one, and we'll do specifically the watermark. Let's go to 'File', and let's go to 'Revert'. I'm going to click on 'Text Effects', and just hit the trash can to get rid of them. They're not deleted forever, I can go back and get them. So basically all we're going to do is type some text in the middle, and record it at the same time. I want to record it in this Default Actions. I'm going to click on this one that says, I'm going to make a New Action, this little turned-up peach here. Let's give it a name, and we'll call this one 'Watermark'. This one's going to be a watermark for just text. You can give it shortcut keys, but if you're like me, on a Mac, none of these work, that will open iTunes or something else.

 
Let's just click 'Record', and now you got to be careful. It's remembering every single thing you do. The little record button's going, and we freak out, I do anyway. So just remember it's going to record every step. So our steps are going to be, I'm going to grab my 'Type Tool', I'm going to pick a color for my Type. I'm going to click once in here, no Type. Now this isn't my photograph, this is one from Unsplash, so this is Paul Hermann's photograph, so I'm going to be doing it then. I have the copyright symbol, and if you're like me, I can never remember what key it is. On a PC or Mac, just hold down your 'Alt' or 'Option' key, and just smash away the keys - it's my method anyway - until I find the copyright, got lucky. 

With it being a watermark you now decide on how big it is. I'm just transforming it, say I want it to be that big. I'm going to lower the opacity, I'm on my Move Tool. I'm just going to type any of the numbers on my keyboard. You can see, I've set the opacity to 50%. Now one thing you might have to do is, it's a little bit ugly, but it will look good against black or a dark background, but it's going to be a little bit lost here in the white. So often an easy way to kind of have both ways instead of just creating two separate actions, is just to add a Drop Shadow to it. 'Drop Shadow', that's working for me. Means it can be seen up here, and down here, fine. 

I'll lower the opacity again. You can start to see, it's recording everything. I'm not going in a very linear method here. I'm kind of working it out. You can go through and delete these afterwards, if you want to make it all nice and pretty. You don't have to do though, I never do. So I wanted that, I want it to be in the middle. And that's going to be it, I'm going to hit the 'Stop' button. So it's recorded now, let's look at Image 2. And what we need to do now is play back that thing we've recorded that action. Now weirdly it will-- if I hit 'Play' now it'll play from wherever this gray highlight is. So it's only going to do the Move Layer. So you need to click back on there for some reason. Then hit 'Play', and it's going to run through them. Watch it, it'll scream through all these, watch. It used to be able to like topple through them all. You can see there, added a watermark. Cool, huh? 

Let's get a little bit more advanced, and let's say we want to update it, because we're going to run into trouble, like, there's fine, there's fine, that's good. Let's say-- let's do two things, I want to put in image in it rather than text. So I'm going to go to 'File', 'Revert'. Back to the beginning, and instead of doing this one here, I'm just going to twirl it up. So it's nice and tidy, I'm going to create a new one. And this one's going to be called 'Watermark', but this one's going to be my 'Logo'. Instead of just typing in, I've got like a logo that we've already made, and I click 'Record'. Basically it's the same thing, we're going to go to, 'File', 'Place Embedded' though instead of typing out text. 

In your '03 Preferences', there's 'Logo - White'. I'm going to click 'Place'. I'm going to get it to the right size, that works for me. Hit 'Enter' on my keyboard, can you see, it's recording 'Place'. I'm going to lower the opacity down to maybe 40%. I add my Drop Shadow again. There we go. Let's do something even more advanced, because basically we could stop that now and go and play it. Actually let's do that, let's stop it, go over here, go back to the top, hit 'Play'. And it goes and brings through my logo. Cool, huh? We'll batch them in the next video. At the moment we're just doing the action, and we'll show you how to do them to hundreds of images in one go. That'll be the very next video. 

So 'File' let's go back to 'Revert', let's go back to this one. So another bit more advanced action-ness. We've done this, but let's say we want to adjust it again. Like do something else, we want to put it down the bottom right, like this. So we've already created this. How do we go and edit it? What we can do is, we can say, here, at this stage I want to start recording again. And whatever you do from now on will just add to that list. I want to show you a little trick of how to do it in the bottom right, because it's not as simple as it sounds, there's a little work around. 

So what we need to do is select both of these layers, then use, your Line Functions up here, but it doesn't work as the background. This background here, this is locked, gives us all sorts of grief, right? So all we need to do is double click the background, click 'OK'. You should give it a name. Then we can use the feature. Instead of just shift-clicking like we do up here, we can use like an automated feature, the actions is going to like a little bit better, because it likes going to here, and just going 'Select', 'All Layers'. Finds that easier, then at the top here, we can go, I would like to 'Align to Right'. Then I want to go down to the bottom. You can see in here, it's just aligning the current layers I have selected. That one does the bottom, that one does the left. 

Next thing I want to do is have just the Logo Layer selected, and I'm going to move it up and to the left. You can kind of see there in my little tool tip there, saying kind of come up 32 pixels and across 44. That's kind of cool because it means it's going to work fine for portrait. It's going to go bottom right and just kind of come out the mounted space. Makes sense, kind of, let's hit 'Stop'. Now hopefully if I go to 'Image 3'. I can go back up to 'Watermark Logo', hit 'Play'. And edit it, go to bottom right. I'm sure I've said bottom left before, but just kind of comes out a few pixels. This side, try it here for one that's kind of like just a different shape, with respect to this beginning one, that's a really different shape. Let's delete the text off it, and let's go 'Play'. Cool, huh? 

Now my friends, that is going to be it for creating watermarks. We did text and a logo. In the next video, actually the second one after this one, next one we'll do some more advanced actions. And the video after that, we'll do kind of batching, so we can do them for a zillion different images all in one big go. All right, I'll see you then.