Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com.
On this episode let's take a look at adding captions or watermarks to images using Preview.
Say you want to add a caption or watermark to a photo.
So, I'm going to start off here in the Photos app and just drag out to the desktop a jpg
image.
You could, of course, start with a jpg image already as a file but I just wanted to show
that in case you are starting from there.
Then I'm going to open this up in Preview which is the default app for opening up a
jpg file or most image files.
If not I could have always just opened up the Preview app and then used File/Open from
in there to grab it or dragged and dropped on to it.
So I've got my image now to jpg and I want to add some text to it.
Now we want to turn on the markup tools and it is this little markup toolbar button here
at the top.
Once we turn that on we now have a whole set of tools here, including the ability to add
text.
This little T here is the text button.
I tap that.
It creates a piece of text and then I can drag that anywhere around on the screen.
Now to edit what that text says I can double click inside and I can type something and
I can even put another line like that.
I tap away and I can go back and drag this.
I can edit it again.
I can then use these tools here to change the font, for instance, and I can make it
bold if the font has that.
So let's go to something like Arial and we can bold it.
I can change the size.
I can center it in that box or justify it.
I can change the color of it as well.
Than I can also, with it selected, change other things about it.
Like, for instance, here I can change the background color of the box it is in.
I can also change the border color.
So you can do that if you want.
The only thing you can do here, this is changing the line styles, and if you are drawing lines
instead of text you can use this.
But you can use the drop shadow there and now you will notice that it has a slight drop
shadow under it.
It is a bit hard to see.
There we go.
You can see the drop shadow which helps a lot when the colors are kind of about the
same.
So we can see if we can change this to a color that's similar.
Now we can see that it is a lot easier to see with that drop shadow under it because
without it it would be almost invisible.
What happens when I save this out?
I'm just going to do a regular save and I've got the original file right here.
So let's close it.
Then open it again.
We can see now that the text is on it but it is no longer editable.
It has been permanently placed on the image which is what you would expect because this
is a jpg and a jpg isn't some sort of multi layered document that can include things like
text.
So this is now just an image again.
I can't edit it anymore.
However I can still use File/Revert to and browse all the versions and I can see that
I've got in versions on the Mac, I've got the ability to go back to the previous version
of the document.
So there we go.
I can go back to that one and I can restore it.
Now I've restored it here with that text gone.
I just can't edit it.
I have to be able to revert to a previous version or use the current one that has the
text imbedded on there.
Now if I wanted to put some sort of watermark then it would make more sense to create something
that had a little bit smaller font.
Then put that down in the corner or some such but
the result is the same.
When I'm done and I save I'm going to get this jpg here where that will be permanently
imbedded into the image.
So now when I share this somewhere, upload this to a social network or a photo sharing
site or webpage it will have my watermark or my caption or whatever it is permanently
imbedded in the jpg image.
Now since the markup tools from Preview are part of the markup tools used by other apps
like say in Mail, you can be ready to email an image like this.
You can use the markup tool inside the Mail app for the same thing.
So just before you send the image off to somebody you can go ahead and set the font and things
like that, put some text, and do whatever you want with it.
So you could, for instance, just if you want to send somebody a sample you could just put
a watermark or a caption of some sort right in the middle of the photo there.
Hit Done.
They're going to get a jpg image that is just a plain jpg that has this imbedded into the
photo here.
So you can be sure that they don't use it or they get the message if it is something
not to be used or something where you need to be given credit.