MacMost Now 860: Adding a Watermark With Pixelmator

You can use a graphics program like Pixelmator to add some semi-transparent text to your photos before uploading them. Adjusting the color and opacity of the text will make sure the text doesn't interfere with the photo's content, unless you want it to.

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Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today's episode let's take a look at adding watermarks to photos using Pixelmator.
So the general idea here is that you want to upload a photo to the internet and you want to put a little bit of text on the photo. Not enough to take away from the photo itself but just to identify it as a photo you took that is yours.
Adding text is easy enough. Use Tools here on the left and hit TextTool and we'll just click and I'll just put, say, my name.  We can make some adjustments too. We can select it and then stretch it over here so my name is on one line.
Now that is not exactly what we want because I don't want it to appear that big on there. I want it to be barely visible. So let's start making some adjustments. 
First let's change the font there to something a little bit more normal, something like that. Then left justify it here. Actually I want to right justify it because I want to put it on the bottom right hand corner. Let's leave it up here for now so you can see it a little better.
Let's make it a little smaller. That's probably too small. Let's do it somewhere around there. Then we want to start playing with some of the things. For instance it has some settings on it right now. It has a shadow. I'll do Command T here to edit the font. See I do have shadows turned on. So now we've got something a little bit better.
Now I could make it a different color to have it blend a little bit more with the background. So let's say something like this. But, instead of doing that, we will keep it black now and make it semi-transparent. So I'll bring up Layers here. I want to show all the layers using View/Show Layers and I can see here that the text is, of course, automatically its own layer. I can Hide It/Show It. Blending is set to normal. I am going to set the Opacity down and you can see it fade there. So now it is still black text but it is fading in with whatever color is there. So that looks pretty good as a watermark. Just barely there.
I'm going to move it down to the bottom right and you can see you really can't see it at all now because it is darker there. So what I want to do is I want to change the color and make it a white so it lightens the area there. I can switch the Opacity a little bit like that and now it kind of gives me that watermark effect that I want there. I can put it just where I want in the bottom right hand corner and now when I export that will be there imprinted over that.
Another type of watermark you might want to add that is a little more extreme is to take this here and let's make this huge. Maybe not that huge, let's put it like that. Right across a critical piece of display there. Then we will go and bring up the Layers again and make that very dim. So dim in fact that you can barely see it but it is still there.
That way if somebody is trying to steal the image may not notice that it is there and then you can prove later that it is yours. A little more extreme. Nothing I would ever do but it might be something you are looking for.
Of course putting something like that across the entire image may be appropriate in the case where you want to show somebody a sample photo. Say you are a photographer and you want to show them here's a photo I've taken and if you want to purchase it let me know and I'll give you the original. That way they can't just steal the one that you have showed them.
So I hope you found this tutorial on Watermarks in Pixelmator useful. 
Until next time this is Gary with MacMost Now.

Comments: 2 Responses to “MacMost Now 860: Adding a Watermark With Pixelmator”

Joel

12 years ago

Do you know of a way to make this watermark re-usable, so that one doesn't have to go through so many steps for every image?

Gary Rosenzweig

You can always copy and paste it from one to the other.

Comments Closed.

MacMost Now 860: Adding a Watermark With Pixelmator

Comments: 2 Responses to “MacMost Now 860: Adding a Watermark With Pixelmator”

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