On this tutorial we will learn how to watermark images so you can take multiple photos and process them all together by applying an Action.

Open your picture on Photoshop and first thing you want to do is open up your logo like a in a dpi format. A pdf dialogue box will open up and your will be prompted to choose your logo. A resolution of 72 dpi is fine for the purposes of this tutorial.

Once you have your logo open you will need to use the laso tool in order to extract the silhouette version-that is the plain version with no graphics or skins-of your logo in order to turn it into its watermarked version.

Once you select hit the “V” button which will extract it and then simply drag and drop it on your Photoshop window on the right top corner. Moving on grab your layers panel and ctrl+click the thumbnail of your logo and click on the pads tab of your layers panel, that is the third tab. Then you want to click on the 5th from left, icon on the bottom toolbar of you pads tab that is the convert action to path button.

Once you hit that it will convert your action into a workpath, save that. Now you are free to delete the layer with the logo!

In case you are confused what we just did is creating a workpath that consist only of the shape of our logo with no fill at all! This would look like this.

Grab your actions panel from the top menu->Actions. We are now going to create an automated task that you record and then apply on every one of your pictures saving you a lot of time.

Click on New Action on the Action Panel and name the action you are about to record, we will name this Watermark. Once done hit the record button on your Actions Panel making sure you have the Watermark actions selected.

1. First thing you want to do is on the actions panel right click and on the pop up menu hit insert path.
2. Create a new layer and on this new layer paste the action path your created earlier with your logo.
3. Fill that new layer with any colour you want and deselect that layer.
4. Select layer one on your layers panel and hit Drop Shadow->Screenmode to give our logo some depth. Choose the colour of you shadow white if you want to give it an outer glow.
5. Set the opacity to 9 and the distance to 0 and the spread to 11 and the size to around 15.
6. Go to blending options of your Layer Styles panel and on the advanced blending box we are going to set the filter glow opacity to 0 and hit ok. This will leave only the outside halo of our logo while the fill will remain blank see-through like.

Now the only thing that is left to do is go to your Photoshop’s top toolbar and hit Select -> Select All and select the entire image in order to align our logo to the entire image.

So we go to Layer-> Align Layer to Selection Vertical Edges and then Layer -> Align Layer to Selection Horizontal Edges which will move our logo to the centre of any photo we want to work on and Ctrl+D to deselect and stop recording and your watermark action is ready!

Try applying the same watermark action to any other photo and you immediately get your watermarked logo right in the middle of your image.

This is an excellent timesaver as it involves several time consuming steps as shown that you probably dont want to go over and over again when processing a lot of photos. Try to see how effectively it works for you!

You might find these related posts useful too: