From the course: Photoshop 2020 Essential Training: Photography

Creating a transparent watermark - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2020 Essential Training: Photography

Start my 1-month free trial

Creating a transparent watermark

“

- [Instructor] One of the easiest ways to create a transparent watermark is by using a layer style in Photoshop. I'll tap the T key in order to select the type tool and then right click in order to reset the tool. I'm going to increase the point size maybe to 100 and I'm also going to click in the color swatch and select white as my text color. Then I'll click in the image area and I'll tap option G on the Mac to get the copyright symbol. So on Windows that would be an ALT and a 0169. Then I'll tap the space bar and I'll start typing in my name and then to commit to that text I'll tap on the check mark. At the bottom of the layers panel I'm going to click the effects icon and select drop shadow. I'll reset it to the default and then move the layer styles panel out of the way a bit. I want to increase the opacity of the drop shadow. I also want to change the angle and the distance and well I can use this slider and the wheel here I can also just reposition it by dragging in the image area. I'm going to decrease the size of it to make it a little bit more obvious and just position it down a little bit more in the window. But the problem is I want to see through the text and right now I can't. So I'm going to move to the blending options area. If I decrease the opacity I lose not only the opacity of the text but also the layer style. So instead in the advanced blending I'll choose to decrease the fill opacity. Now any of the pixel values on that layer, in this case the type, will be hidden but I'll still see that drop shadow. I might increase the fill opacity just a bit more so we can still see some of the white text. Then I'll reposition the layer style so that I can access the drop shadow again and I just want to decrease the opacity, I think it's a little bit too much. Of course you don't have to use the drop shadow, there are a lot of different layer styles. If you prefer the bevel and emboss look you can give that a try or any of these other options. Now if I thought I want going to use this exact style again with all of these settings and with that blending option of the fill opacity then I could save it in my styles panel. I'll click styles and then choose new style and I'll call it DS for drop shadow and then watermark. This is going to save the style in the styles panel but I'm also going to add it to my current library which we'll talk about in just a moment. I need it to include both the layer effect as well as the layer blending options otherwise it won't save that decreased fill. I'll click OK and OK again and we can see that it's been added to my styles panel as well as to my library. The great thing about it being applied to the styles panel is if tomorrow if I open another document and let's go ahead and take off the effect, I'm going to need to not only take off the effect but also increase that fill amount. Well that fill amount in your layers style is the same fill that's on the layers panel so let's increase the fill. So now I've got my text but this could be any text on any layer in any document. When I click on the style it's going to apply not only the drop shadow but also change the fill for me. All right, I'm going to use command Z in order to undo that and then I'll click on the libraries panel because this is another way to apply that layers style. The text layer selected, I just click on the layer style. The advantage to using the libraries panel is that any of the layer styles or any other content that you store in the libraries panel will be uploaded to the Cloud and you can access it from any computer where you login with your Adobe ID. All right, I'll select the move tool by tapping on the V key and then I'll just reposition this down using command T or CTRL+T in order to resize it and tapping the enter key in order to apply that transformation. Excellent, you can see how easy it is to create your own transparent watermark using the layer styles in Photoshop.

Contents