Since yesterday’s post I have received a few interesting wildlife photography questions so I will definitely do another Q&A post in future. Feel free to keep asking away!
I had a recent request for a quick run through on how you can add text or an image watermark to your images. I decided on this image of a pride of lions at the beginning of a hunt. Apart from it being a great sighting I quite liked the desaturated look of the final image. For now, however, the focus is the text in the top left corner and the Photo-Africa logo in the bottom left corner so for whatever reason you want to add text or a watermark to your images here goes. There are obviously a hundred different ways in which you can do this but for the purposes of this post I chose to do it in Photoshop.
Once you have completed all adjustments to your image you are ready to add you text and / or watermark in Photoshop. First step is to select the Text tool.
From here add whatever text you want to include, size it and place it where you want it on your image.
Once you are happy with the placement of your text you now have the option of changing the opacity to make the text blend in more and not be too much of a distraction.
In the Layers palette select your text layer, which will show you the text you entered earlier. Once selected you can use the opacity selector to blend your text into your image to get it to the ideal watermark look you are after. In my image I selected an opacity of 60%.
The same steps can be followed to place images, such as your logo, onto your images. First up click on’File’ and ‘Place’.
From here select the image you want to use. When I place images, such as logos, on to images I prefer to use PNG format but you can use GIF and JPEG as well. Once you have selected your file the image will be placed in the middle of your image. For this example I have chosen the Photo-Africa logo.
From here you can now resize your image and place it where you want. Same as with the text, you can now change the opacity to blend the image to your final watermark. In my final image I changed the logo’s opacity to 75%.
First step is to select the logo layer, which will contain the file name of the image you placed, and then from there adjust the opacity to your liking.
This might look like a lot of work but it will literally take you a few seconds once you have done it a few times. If is stills feels like a lot of work you can always go and look at programs like Visual Watermark which makes watermarking very easy and if you are planning to watermark a large amount of images does a pretty decent job. I have used Visual Watermark in the past but ultimately prefer the options and customizability of Photoshop. Once more the final result of this little watermark tutorial.
As I sign off until Monday, how many lions do you see in this image? Oh, and the hunt was not successful. One of the youngsters could not contain his excitement and blew it for the entire pride.
Have a good one. 
Gerry
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Hi Gerry,
Thanks for your tut, found it extremely helpful!
Just one question though: is there a way of saving your customized watermark, or do you have to re-write it each time for any other photo you add? Surely there must be a way of doing it, but just thought I’d ask anyway!
About the lions: is it a trick question?
Seems like there are “hidden” ones behind the 3 we see…not exactly sure but it looks like there might be 5! Close, or no cigar???
Cheers,
Michael
Hi Michael,
If you are going to use the same text or logo each time you can create a seperate PNG or JPEG images and simply place this each time. Save a lot of time. Another option is to create an Action in Photoshop which will run through all the steps each time you click it but the easier option for now is to create a file and place it as per the post.
Good guess on the lions as well. There were 4 with another 7 out of frame to the right. So for all intensive purposes – yeah… you were close!
Take care!
G