Lessons

Lesson Info

Custom Water Marks

Let's go ahead and take a look at how we can make a watermark in Photoshop. So, I'm gonna go ahead and make this smaller, and I'm gonna go ahead and open up a new document. I'm gonna make this, what I'm gonna do with this watermark is I wanna make a watermark that is both a brush watermark and a shape watermark. Alright. This is pretty interesting, because what happens, this'll show you exactly what I'm talkin' about between the difference between a rasterized shape and a vector-based shape when we're talking about the watermark that we might make for a photograph. So I'm gonna change this to 72 pixels per inch. I'm gonna change the width to something small. We'll just start at something like 600 by 600. I'm doing this small on purpose so you can see the difference here. So if I were to go ahead and make a watermark that was my name, I would start with a typeset and just type, we'll just say it's just Blake Rudis. We aren't gonna go into the Photography part. We'll just do Blake Rudis.

I can't see it now 'cause it's on white. And if you can't find your text because it's on white, look at the little tool. Right now you see that there's a box around it, meaning I can make a box of text somewhere else. But watch what happens when I find my text. That box goes away. So now I know that I'm on a typeset. So double-click there, Control + A. Change that color to black, K. I'm gonna use a different font this time. I'm gonna use something a little bit more playful and fun. That's one of my other favorite fonts to use. (chuckling) Blake udis, who's that? I'm gonna press Control + T, make that font a little bit smaller, move it over. How did I forget my R? And press enter and put an R there. There we go, that's, I told you I was gonna get sick a my own name. (chuckling) So that's a pretty interesting-looking watermark. I think we'll go with that. And it looks like we have another. There we go. I really botched my own name up there. You don't wanna do that. (chuckling) So what I'm gonna do with this is I'm gonna go ahead and drop out the background here. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to Edit, and I'm gonna go to Define Brush Preset. So when I define a brush preset, I can make a brush preset just like we saw with the dog paws. I can make a brush preset of my watermark so that I always have access to it. So if I say Define Brush Preset. We'll call this my actual name, Blake Rudis. And now, if I press B for my brush tool, and I have my layer open, I can brush that on anywhere I want, 'cause I've got a brush now, okay. But let's take this one step further. Let's go ahead and delete that. Let's go ahead and, we need to define this as a shape. So you'll see right here that this, we can't define a custom shape right now. So what I need to do is I need to right-click on this and I need to convert this to a work path. That's now gonna tell Photoshop that this is a working path, that if I go up to Edit and I go to Define Custom Shape now, it can actually make a shape from that path. So once I say Define Custom Shape and call this Blake Rudis, now we have a shape of my name. So now if I go, and go to File, and go to New, and let's make a huge image. Let's make it twice, that's too big. Let's do 8,000. Whoa, $8,000 by 300, K. Now my brush is gonna appear very small. So even if I were to brush on this very large and get that brush as large as I can get it, which is 5,000, change this color to black, and brush it on... you're gonna see the hard edge that's around it, the very pixelated edge that's around it. Why is that? Because we took a brush that we made that was 500 pixels, and now we're telling it to be 5,000 pixels. We're interpolating a brush, because a brush is pixel-based. So often times you'll see people say "Make your watermark as a brush." Well, yeah, that's one way you can do it. And a lot of the times your watermark's gonna be small. But I would consider, because you want that watermark to look really good, go ahead and make that watermark because we also defined that as a shape, remember. So if we go into our custom shape tool, which is outside of the rectangular shape, or the rounded rectangular shape, we go to where we set all those dog paws, we have our shape here. It's automatically gonna put it in with our shapes. So if I click on this, and I put my shape down, I get to say how big I want this shape to be. The cool part about this is that because it's a vector-based shape, look at the difference. It's completely clean, absolutely clean. So I can take a shape that was even made from a 512 vector-based text that we converted to a work path and make it as large as I want. I can make this the size of the CreativeLive studio. But if I did that with this, it would look like someone ran around with spray paint all over the CreativeLive studio, and I don't think they would want that. Definitely wouldn't want my name all over the place. (chuckling) So, I'll go ahead and delete those and we'll look at a practical application that we can use these watermarks for. So I'll go ahead and open up this image. So when I open up this image, I could still use my brush, because it's a smaller image. So we could use the brush if we wanted to, but let's just go ahead and get in the habit of doing things the right way and use a shape. If I click and hold on this shape and just move around freeform, it's gonna make my name appear all kinds of crazy. So if I press and hold Shift, it's gonna lock it into the actual constraints that I built that shape with. So I'll make that small. I'll press and hold the V key, or just press the V key, to move down here to the lower right-hand corner of the image. I don't know where it came from, but artists always put their signature in the lower right-hand corner. I think, if I'm making things up off the fly right now, it's probably because we read things from left to right, and the last thing we want you to read is our name, and it's in the lower right-hand corner. I just made that up. We can Google it and see if it's true. (chuckling) So I'm gonna change that shape. If I go ahead and go into that shape, I can change that shape color to white. What I wanna show you here is non-intrusive watermarks. So if we look at this shape, it's very intrusive, it's very, it's big, it's bold, it's white, it's right there in the lower corner of the image. So let's double-click on the layer styles of this. I'm gonna zoom in here so we can see what we're doin' and then zoom out a little bit, and double-click on here, and go into a Bevel & Emboss. Bevel & Emboss is gonna make it appear as if it's either typeset into the painting or lifting out of the painting, depending on if we say what direction we want that bevel to be. I want this bevel to be up. It's gonna make it look like someone wrote on this with puffy paint. If I put this down, it's gonna make it appear as if someone carved my name into the image. If I adjust the depth, it's gonna make the depth of that bevel a little bit deeper. And then the size and the depth kinda work hand in hand. So I can change that depth a little bit. But you also have some other things here like Chisel Hard or Chisel Smooth, depending on how it's affecting the image below. So the cool thing about this is that because I have put a Bevel & Emboss on here, somethin' like that, press okay, if I were to go into the Fill settings of this, drop the Fill down, it's still gonna put the bevel there. You see that? And it's not gonna have the intrusive bold white that's happening there. If I take that a step further and I add a Drop Shadow there, the old, maybe we need to reset that Drop Shadow. (chuckling) Drop this opacity down, change this to something like grey, and then modify, maybe, the distance or somethin' here, maybe make it black. Now that Bevel & Emboss, the Fill, and the Drop Shadow are working together to kinda add a different type of look and feel to the watermark that I have. Less intrusive, my name is still there, gives it kind of an artistic-y feel. Now, I'd say if you're gonna do something like this, you'd probably wanna be consistent with it. And if you're gonna do that with your images, be consistent with how you apply it. But what did we say before? We have libraries. We can save this to the library. So at any time I can go into my libraries here. And if I go into my Graphics, I can go ahead and press the plus sign here and add this content. What do I wanna add? I wanna add the Graphic, the Layer Style, the Fill Color, the Stroke Color, and the Foreground Color. And when I add it, all of those things are added in here, and I can use that at any time in my image. Here's that shape. If I drag and drop this onto my photograph, that's saved to that library. It's saved to the Cloud. Because what's gonna happen is if at any time you accidentally reset your shapes and you didn't save that shape, it's now gone forever. But because we went ahead and loaded it up to the libraries, it's now in the Cloud, it's forever gonna be there. And no matter what computer I go onto, whether it's this laptop, my computer at home, I'm always gonna have access to that watermark, whether I like it or not. (chuckling) One of the things that we can create here, too, is a combination of shapes and texts, and that would be doing something with, say a lower third. So a lot of the times you see lower thirds in videos, or you want to, maybe, showcase an individual in a magazine and you wanna do it in a way that looks professional. We can combine shapes and texts to make what's called a lower third that could then fly into a video, or it could be something that just pops in right below my name like this. So if I were to go ahead and add a shape here and make a rectangular shape, and this is just a really basic kinda lower third, if I press and hold Shift, adding that shape there, shapes don't necessarily have to be stuck with the shape that we made right there. So if I press Command or Control + T, I can modify this shape. (humming) Ah. I accidentally locked the layer. Don't lock the layer if you wanna transform it, okay? Unlock the layer, Command or Control + T. Now if I press Control and Shift, or just Control, I can freeform this rectangle by just pulling on one of those angles wherever I wanted to. If I press and hold Shift while I do that, It'll maintain the bottom or 45 degree angles as I work my way around that shape. So I can make that shape somethin' like that, maybe drop that size down a little bit there. And then if I were to press Control + T again, shift it out to somethin' like this, press enter, V for the move tool, move it exactly where I want it to go. I'm just makin' any kinda angle on the edge of that that I want. (mumbling) You can do the sharp edge, or you can make it more rounded if you wanted to, also. I could change the color of this shape to, maybe, something that matches the back of the image. So if I double-click on that shape, I get maybe more of that kinda tan or cream color, maybe even a skin-tone color, or even the blue that we see here. That might look kinda cool. Press that. Move this down. Press Control. If it gets stuck to something, just press Control. I could even add a drop shadow to that by double-clicking on the inside of it, have that Drop Shadow. Maybe bring this down a little bit here. And then use my type tool, T, just type. Again, I can't, I don't even know my name. Long day. V for the move tool. Control + T. Make that a little bit smaller. You could even have it fit inside or make it look like it's kinda poppin' out a little bit. Press T to change, maybe, the color to something like white. And now we have a basic lower third, very simple basic lower third. And you can use whatever typeset you want. If you want that to stay within the confines of that shape, just press Control + T, make it smaller until it fits inside there. I kinda like how it looked when it was just comin' off the top of it a little bit there. And that can be a really professional thing to add to a video that you're doing, if you do any video production, just having a simple lower third that flies in when the person starts talking. You see it all the time on news channels. That's exactly how they're making those lower thirds. It's just somethin' that goes along the bottom of the video. Maybe you work with video of landscapes when you go to some of the places that you might do some of your shooting. You could slide in a lower third that says where you are at that park, or where you are in your endeavors. Alright, so that about wraps us up. We learned a lot about text here. We learned about how to control text, how to type with text, all the different ways to type with text, the difference between OpenType fonts, TrueType fonts, the difference between shapes, how we manipulate shapes using Control + T to increase and decrease the size of those, and how Control + T becomes our best friend when we're working with shapes and transforming shapes and text. We talked about how to combine those things to work those into things that we can do within our portfolio or things that we can do for client-based work. So do we have any questions on shapes and texts? When you mentioned about putting that into the library, I noticed that they were in a list of all the things you used to make it. Can you group that and put it in as a group? I do believe so. What it's doing there is it's not just showing you the shape that it makes. It's also showing you all the things that makes that shape and layer styles that are associated with that shape so that you can use those layer styles on other things. Alright, so that concludes our lesson on shapes and texts. If you wanna follow me at f64 Academy, go to f64.co/cl. And in the next lesson, we're gonna be talking about smart objects.