In yesterday’s post, we took a close look at what happens when you use different size watermark files on different size output, and determined that the Scale Watermark feature is essentially useless. (There has to be a reason for it and a way to make it work, but I can’t figure it out. By all means let me know if you have!)

Today, we’ll discuss what size to make your watermark, what stylings to use (and not to use), we’ll create some using Photoshop — as well as using two FREE solutions — and finally of course we’ll set them up in Aperture.

Oh, and there’s a video podcast of the most relavent bits at the end of this post. Enjoy!

Determining size

What we discovered yesterday was that if you make a watermark larger than the output size (for example a watermark that’s 1000 pixels wide and apply it to an 800 pixel wide image), then it will be scaled down to the 800 size. Alternatively if we use something smaller, say 200 pixels wide, it will never be scaled up. This tells us that we can possibly get away with a single watermark size, assuming that our output are all roughly the same size. For example, if you usually output images at 800 for email, 1000 for web, and 1200 for client review, then you could create one at 1000 or so and never look back. And since a good watermark isn’t some huge glaring ugly thing on your photo, I’d argue that a 1000 wide watermark is plenty big for any size output. And keep in mind when I’m saying 1000 wide, I don’t mean 1000 tall as well… more like 100 tall and 1000 wide—and that’s assuming you have something really long to say! Mine, as you’ll see, are around 600 wide.

What do you put in your watermark?

Do you want to just have text, like this?

That file is only 300 pixels wide, and notice that it has a chunk of blank space to the left of it, so the info isn’t crammed up against the left side of the screen (I like my watermarks in the lower left, but that’s of course up to you).

If you want it to say more, the file just gets wider. What you put in there is entirely up to you; a logo, a name, a signature, whatever you like.

But we still need to figure out how to “decorate” it. The above sample works fine on a bright photos, but not so great on a dark one. Here’s the watermark I’ve used in the past, and although it’s not perfect, it works probably 90% of the time.

It’s white text with a subtle shadow around it so it stands off of lighter backgrounds, and it has a thin white stroke around the characters to beef them up a bit (less than the bold font choice for that font did). Yes, this is a little hard to read against really bright photos, but it hasn’t been a problem for me. I would suggest that if you like this style and do produce a lot of bright photos, consider making a second version that is darker; perhaps simple black text with no shadow.

This file is 600 pixels wide by only 23 pixels tall by the way, which means it’s almost never scaled down since it’s really rare I’d output something smaller than 600 wide.

Here’s another approach that will work on a wide variety of images. The idea is that the dark band in the back is a gradient, and it fades out to nothing just past the “.com”. I used to use this style a lot, but I found at times that it didn’t fade off well; it got chunky or somehow ugly. The last thing you want in a watermark is for it to be distracting! But of course, your mileage may vary.

Perhaps you want something a bit more original, like a signature? If you have a Wacom tablet, that’s easy enough to do. If not, you can try using a utility like Autograph by Ten One Design if you have a trackpad; it allows you to use your finger to sign! Pretty cool. Here’s a made-up AE (ApertureExpert) “signature”.

Applied to a photo, that’s actually kinda cool… this is done with the opacity set to 100%. I’d probably make it a bit smaller and play with scaling the opacity back, but I like it!

Tip: if you’re going to do a signature, create it much larger than you need it, then scale it down. It’ll be easier to draw a good signature with a tablet when you have room to work with.

If you’d like to download the PSD files that I use to create the PNGs above, click here.

Where to place them, what opacity to use

There’s no right answer to placement, it just depends on what you want. I’d encourage you to put the watermark subtly around the edge, not big and glaring in the middle. Don’t be this guy…

No one wants to look at that. It will guarantee that your image is never stolen… but will also pretty much guarantee that it will never be looked at, either. So if you truly don’t want anyone, anywhere, to see your work…  ;-)

As far as opacity, that entirely depends on what your mark is to begin with. Keep in mind that you can dial in the opacity on the original file and then apply it at 100% in Aperture. It might be easier to experiment making it solid and then adjusting the opacity in Aperture, but it’s a universal opacity. If you build the opacity in when designing it, you could have some areas lighter than others. More control.

I suppose I should point out at this point that the reason we use PNG files is because they support transparency. That doesn’t just mean a solid object with a nothing background, that actually means that the object itself can be see-through. If you haven’t seen this before, try this out, it’s cool. Tap the keyboard shortcut Command-Shift-4 — your cursor will be come a crosshair. Now, tap the space bar. The cursor becomes a camera. Roll around the screen, and you’ll see whatever window you’re over highlight blue. When you click the mouse, whatever window was blue will be captured as a screenshot—as a .PNG file, and put on the desktop. Go ahead and click on a window. Now, go to the Desktop and open that Screenshot file (it’ll be called something like Screen shot 2011-03-03 at 20.46.11). Double-click it to open in Preview, and you’ll see the window with a soft shadow around it, against a grey background. That shadow is actually transparent, and if you were to take it into Photoshop, you could layer it against other images, and it would look just like it does in the OS. That’s PNG at work—actual transparency within the file. This is why we use it for watermarks. You can build shadows, glows, or any other partially-transparent element into the mark!

Everything above was created in Photoshop. And I know what you’re thinking…

You said no Photoshop!

Yep! And here we go… how do you create a PNG file with transparency without Photoshop? I dug, I tweeted, I got lots of great responses, and two apps stuck out at me. Special thanks to @bradclarkuk and @chimpoko on twitter, who pointed me to Aviary and Seashore, respectively—two apps I’d never heard of before this adventure began.

Aviary is an online solution (software in the cloud), and Seashore is a download. Neither are what I’d call Photoshop killers, but they will get the job done for something this simple. Let’s have a look.

~ Aviary (HTML 5 Online Photo Editor) ~

Go to Aviary.com and click on Phoenix, the Image Editor. It’ll launch into a new window and load up the software. You’ll need to create an account eventually to save and output your work, but it’s all free.

Creating your file

Once launched, click Start from Scratch and enter a file size. Give yourself some room to move if you’re just going to play; you can always crop down later. I’ll create a 600 x 50 pixel canvas and try to recreate the watermark you saw above. Be sure to set your background to Transparent.

Tip: If you’re using the Chrome browser, you can set the browser to Full Screen mode and refresh the Phoenix page, and have a full-screen image editor. Pretty cool!

Keep in mind I’ve spent about 10 minutes in Aviary/Phoenix now, so there may be easier or better ways to do this, but here’s what I was able to do pretty quickly.

Adding text

Select the Text tool, which amazingly displays all the fonts installed in your system, click on the canvas and start typing. You can adjust size and color at any time (I changed mine to white, not yet done in this screenshot).

The layers palette in the top right shows you the text and your original transparent layer. I’d suggest duplicating the text layer once you’re satisfied, because once you add a shadow it will bitmap the text and you’ll have to start over if you want to change something. The duplicate command is under the Options button at the bottom of the Layers palette. Here’s the palette with a duplicated text layer:

You may have noticed that the Untitled-1 layer (that was transparent) is filled with grey. To do that, select a color at the bottom left color palette, and grab the paint bucket icon, select that layer and click in it. It’s a good idea to have something there when creating your shadow so you can see what it really looks like; just don’t forget to hide it before you export your PNG.

Adding a shadow

Now to add the shadow, with the text layer selected, click the (ƒ) button at the bottom of the layers palette.

That will warn you that it has to convert to a bitmap to add any effects—which is why you duplicated the text layer before doing this.

Unfortunately the controls here aren’t great. 

Set the quality to high as that does make a significant difference. I’d like to scale back the strength less than 1, but you can only go from 0 to 1 and higher, no in-between. I blurred it only 2 pixels and set the distance to 2, which was reasonable. You could make the shadow grey instead of black; that might help to make it look less dramatic. I left the settings as you see in the screenshot above.

Once done, save the file (you’ll need to create an account now if you haven’t already). Saving happens on their servers, and you have to save before you can export. Once saved, you’re ready to export a PNG file to your desktop!

Exporting a PNG

Don’t forget to hide the background layer so your shadowed text is against transparency, then select Export Image from the File menu.

Choose PNG, and click Generate Image. It will look like it needs to wait a while, but it’ll be done instantly and be ready for you to click the Download button. That’s it!

The result

Here’s the file I created in Aviary Phoenix (empty space cropped to fit in this column, but the text hasn’t been touched):

Not too bad! It’s not as smooth as the Photoshop file however. The rendering from text to bitmap wasn’t handled terribly well, but again I only did this once at this size. You may want to try creating it larger and scaling it down, or perhaps other fonts will render better. But for a free online app, this is pretty spectacular!

~ Seashore (open source software) ~

This app is a free, open source application from seashore.sourceforge.net based on the GIMP standards. Unlike GIMP, the interface is considerably more Mac-like.

Creating your file

When you launch the app you’ll get the new document window. Pretty straight-forward, and don’t forget transparency.

Adding text

This is a little curious, to be honest. As far as I can tell, you can’t edit the text once it goes down. It appears to be rasterized (converted to pixels) the moment you click the Add button.

You have to choose your color before selecting the text tool, so do that first—click the color palette in the top right corner of the interface and pick your color. Click the T icon to open the text editor, and type in your text. Clicking Change Font… will bring up the OS Font chooser, which is also where you can change the size. To move it, click the Move… button, then nudge it with your keyboard arrows. And yes, the text box really is super transparent the whole time.

Remember you can also add a background to view your text against (already done above). Click the (+) at the bottom left to make a new layer, pick a color at the top right, and use the paint bucket to fill the empty layer.

Adding a shadow

This gets a little tricker; very Photoshop old-skool. Unless I’m missing it (entirely possible), there are no drop shadow tools (or bevel, or glow, etc.) at all. But what you can do is re-create the text layer — in black — then blur it. Here we go.

Repeat the steps you just did to add text, but set the color to black first (before you open the text tool, remember). Move it around so it’s barely offset from the original text, and of course you should be creating this behind the original (but you can rearrange layers if you need to later). Click the screenshot below to open larger if you need to.

Now to blur that lower layer. In the button bar you’ll see a tool that’s an arrow with a blur behind it. Click that, and then you can click Choose Effect from the button that appears, although the one you want (Blur/Motion Blur) is the default. To apply it, you click on the screen twice—the distance and direction between the two clicks defines the blur.

Since you want a very subtle blur, you may wan to zoom in considerably and basically blur it by just one or two pixels. If you don’t like the first attempt, just Command-Z to undo, and click-click again.

If that blur is stronger than you like, you can adjust the transparency of the layer by clicking on the little (i) next to the layer name.

Exporting a PNG

Time to get that PNG output! Of course you can save your file in it’s native format first, just like any other Mac application. Don’t forget to disable the background if you created one (so it’s against transparency again), then just go File > Export and select Portable Network Graphics (PNG) from the options.

And that’s it!

The result

This file is 600 wide and to display it exactly as-is, it’s running off the edge of this screen. You can drag it out to your desktop see the whole thing if you like.

So what do you think? … … … Yeah, me too.

Awful. Could it be better? I sure hope so. If you didn’t do the shadow, maybe it’d be cleaner. I think it’s a bad anti-aliasing job though on rendering the original text. I know it’s small text so it’s harder to do, but this looks too bad to use. By all means, take some time to figure out if you can do better—it’s free software, after all. Or perhaps you create a watermark that doesn’t have a shadow?

Aviary or Seashore?

Not much of a debate here—Aviary Phoenix produced a much better quality file. You do have to be online to use this, and online to get to your original files, but it really is an amazing tool. I’m blown away by what’s being done here, to be honest. Seashore is, to be fair, an open source project that’s listed at version 0.5.1, so not exactly mature. But all that matters here is output, and clearly Aviary is best—but still not as good as Photoshop, so do keep that in mind.

I haven’t compared to Pixelmator, which people love, but it’s a $60 app. Far far cheaper than Photoshop, but for the benefit of you, dear readers, I was looking for a free solution.

Let’s put it all together…

Time to go back to Aperture. You have your watermark designed, your PNG file is output, and now you need to get this thing into Aperture. That, fortunately, is the easy part!

Go to the menu Aperture > Presets > Image Export… and the Image Export preset manager will open. If you’ve never played around in here, it’s a wonderful place. This is where you define the size, format, compression, resolution, color profile, and more of the image you will output. If you’re coming from a Photoshop world, where you make this decision (and change these settings) every time you save-as, in Aperture you get to create as many presets for output as you like, and they never change.

Let’s create a brand new one. Select any preset you like, and click the (+) button to duplicate it. It’s convenient to select one similar to what you’ll be creating, but it doesn’t matter.

For this, let’s say we want to create a preset for email, and we want to email watermarked images that are no bigger than 800 x 800 pixels. Select any preset, hit that (+), and change your settings to look like this:

• Image Format: JPEG
• Include Metadata: ON (always!)
• Image Quality: 8 is more than enough for email. 7 is probably fine, too.
• Size: Fit within: 800 x 800 (this ensures that no matter the width or height or orientation of the original file, at it’s biggest it’ll be 800 pixels)
• DPI: 72—you only ever need to change this if you’re outputting for print.
• Gamma & Color Profile can be left at default 

Now for the good stuff…

• Show Watermark: On!
• Position: That’s up to you! I usually put mine in the lower left; in this example I’m putting the “signature” in the lower right
• Opacity: Again this depends on what you’ve created. And you should experiment. You want your mark to be visible, but not annoying or obscuring part of your photo. This example is a solid white watermark with a shadow, so I scaled it back to 60%. It probably could go back farther, as you’ll see in the samples below, but again, that’s up to you.
• Choose Image…: Click that and choose the watermark file you’ve created!
• Scale Watermark: OFF!

Click OK, and you’re done. Want to create more presets with the same watermark at other sizes? Just duplicate this one, and make the changes to Size—the rest will stay the same. Just don’t forget that if you make multiple presets with watermarks, and your mark contains the year, that you’ll need to update all of those when the year changes.

How’s it look?

Here’s a few sample outputs using that preset above—click any photo to see it larger.

And there you have it… the same watermark, applied to three different values of photos, and all readable. And in fact I think it could scale back a bit farther, and go quite a bit smaller, but that’s your call.

Wrap it up!

Creating the watermark itself can be tedious, especially if you don’t have Photoshop or something similar. But, as you’ve seen, there are adequate free solutions, and certainly solutions much cheaper than the big P. But no matter what you have, it can be done, and that’s the important bit.

Now’s the hard part—figuring out what YOUR watermark will be! Come up with something you’re particularly proud of? Post it online and link to it in the comments below!

The Podcast

A video version of the most important bits… here ya go!