Adding Digital Watermarks to Your Photos with Photoshop (2025)

So many people are publishing their digital images in one form or
another these days that it's not hard to see why they would want to
protect their images in one way or another. The following technique
uses Photoshop CS2 to embed a visual "watermark" in an image.

NOTE: This technique,
although demonstrated here with Photoshop CS2, can easily be
accomplished with just about any version of any image manipulation
software (Paint, Paint Shop Pro, GIMP, etc.).

To get started open an image that you want watermarked. I'll be using the image you see in figure 18.1.

figure 18.1

I'll be using text for this technique, but take a quick look at this Paint Shop Pro version, where I used a company logo as the watermark.

With your image opened in Photoshop, it's time to get started...

Click on the "Default Foreground and Background colors" icon to set the
default black foreground and white background colors. The icon is near
the bottom of the Toolbar, just below the foreground and background
color swatches (see figure 18.2).

TIP: You can use the keyboard shortcut to quickly set the default colors. To do so, simply hit the 'D' key.

figure 18.2

Select the Horizontal Type tool and set the
Font Family, the Font Style and the Font Size. I used Myriad set to
Bold Italic 8 points for this example, but you can, and should play
around to see what fits in best with the image(s) and the idea(s) that
you're working on.

Click anywhere inside your image and type in the text you want
displayed as a watermark. I'll type in 'copyright © T. Michael Clark'
for this image (see figure 18.3). Note that I got the copyright symbol
by using ALT 0169 (that is, I held down the ALT key and typed 0169 on
the number pad of my keyboard).

NOTE: If you start typing
and find that the text is too big, or too small, you can select the
text you've entered, using the Type tool and reset the Font Family,
Style or Size.

figure 18.3

Here comes the fun part... Choose Filter, Stylize, Emboss. You'll get a
warning about the type layer needing to be "rasterized" before you can
proceed. Rasterizing the type layer means that it can no longer be
edited. No matter, if need be, you can simply re-create the type layer.
Click "OK" to proceed.

As you can see in figure 18.4, the Emboss effect leaves the
text looking raised. It has also changed the type to a mid-gray color
with light and darker edges giving the effect of embossing. The gray
fill is especially important here because we'll choose a layer-blending
mode that will make the new text visible but not as though we had
simply typed on the image. Instead what will happen is that the gray
will disappear letting the image show through, but the lighter and
darker edges will remain leaving a visible watermark on the image. To
see what I mean, change the layer-blending mode to 'Overlay'. You can
change the layer-blending mode from within the Layer palette. The
pulldown menu to do so is located in the upper left corner of the
Layers palette.

figure 18.4

Figure 18.5 shows my finished image. Notice that, though subtle, the watermark is visible and even readable.

figure 18.5