Have y’all missed me?
I have been super crazy busy with work and such but I’m getting caught up! I got a new laptop today which will make working in strange situations a little easier so hopefully ALL of my work won’t have to be done super late and I can pick up posting on here a little more…let’s hope for that anyway!
Whatever your feelings are on watermarking (I’ve seen mixed things here), I think it’s an important thing to help make sure your content remains YOUR content and not someone else’s on the WWW.
Watermarking is even more important now because of this little thing, y’all may have heard of it, I don’t know….it’s called…
PINTEREST! (LOL)
Well, if you know about it (is there anybody that DOESN’T?) then you know that it’s a great way to share your blog posts and/or tutorials, free printables, etc BUT it’s definitely possible for your original source to be overwritten. It takes one person pinning incorrectly for the image not to link to your site anymore and then, nobody knows it was yours, your image floating around with this great idea and nobody knows where it came from…doesn’t do you any good that way does it?
That’s where I’m inserting the need for watermarking.
Now, before I start with this tutorials, there are TONS of ways to watermark your images for your blog (or whatever source you use). You can just use a text tool in any photo editing program and type “yourblognamehere” and then decrease the opacity and vwala, or, you can do like I’ve done and create a brush!
What I do is create a brush with my ‘logo’ on it so that anytime I’m doing something with images I plan to upload to my blog, I just grab my brush tool and the color I want and brush it on. Easy peasy.
I am using Photoshop CS4. This tutorial can be used to make brushes of any kind in Photoshop, not just watermarks.
STEP 1: Open logo or header or image you’d like to make into a brush & go to “edit/define brush preset”. You’ll want to make sure you’re working with a flat or merged image and preferably a transparent background, even though white will work.
Step 2: Name your brush
You’ll see a little preview of your brush (it’s usually squished) show up and just name your brush anything you’d like, something you’ll remember.
Step 3: Save your brush.
Navigate to your brush menu (just select your brush tool and click the ‘down’ arrow to view your brushes), click on your new brush and hit the top right arrow and then “save brushes”. This will save the brush(es) you selected wherever you’d like so that if they go away or something crazy happens, you don’t have to re-create them.
Step 4: Use your brush!
Just grab the brush from the brush menu and use it, easy peasy!
***Just a note***
When saving the brush, your logo (or image) will be converted to a grayscale image so when you use a color the image will be shaded in that color like it was saved. For example: My Creativity Gone South does not have ANY black in the original, color version SO when I save it as a brush it is ALL gray (different shades but gray nonetheless) so when I pick the color purple, it’s going to use different shades of purple to match the grays in the brush; because my image is all grays NONE of the colors in the brush will be as dark as the original purple I selected. To make sure a brush takes on the full color you want, make sure the entire image is created with black. Using my logo as an example, if I wanted this, I would have changed all of the fonts and the arrow to black and then made the brush but then you wouldn’t see the different shading that you see in the brush above. This is particularly important if you’re creating a brush for others to use of an image, like my chevron brush, that way they’re not wondering why it’s not brushing the same color that they’re choosing.
Hope that made sense!
I can’t wait to see all of YOUR watermarks!
I have missed you!
Always love reading your posts. I always mean to put a watermark on my pictures, but forget! Or I remember at the last minute and don’t want to go back and do it. Having a brush will help for sure instead of having to type it each time, thanks for the tip!