How to Turn a Signature into a Watermark in Photoshop
Hey Cafe Crew, it's Colin Smith here from PhotoshopCAFE and today I'm going to show
you how to turn your signature into a watermark for your photos.
Now, yesterday I did another tutorial which you can check out where I showed you how to
make a watermark out of your logo.
But, today, we're going to a signature.
So the first thing you want to do is get a nice, big, clean, white sheet of paper and
a pencil.
I'm using a 4B pencil here so it's soft.
I want a soft pencil because it creates a nice texture.
Then what you want to do is you want to draw your signature on the paper and make sure
it's nice and big.
But, you know, you can vary it depending on how thick you want it to be.
Now, I'm using that 4B pencil because it's going to give a nice, thick layer and a nice
texture.
And then, what we want to do is we want to take a photograph of it using our mobile device.
So take your phone, make sure you're exactly above it, not at an angle.
And then, in that way, fill it up nicely, and then snap the photo, then send yourself
an email.
Send a full res file.
Open it in your email on your computer with Photoshop and then we're going to go through
the process now of converting that into a brush that we can reuse all the time to create
our watermark.
So all I'm going to do is I'm just press Ctrl L and it would be Command L on Mac, for levels.
And this is one of those times where levels is just great.
So what we're going to do is we're going to drag this little white triangle on the right-hand
side and then it's going to clean up the white on the paper.
You want to do that until all the detail is gone from the paper.
And you can see here, now, we've got a pretty good signature with the texture, but I want
to kind of darken it up a little bit, so grab the black triangle on the left-hand side and
pull that in and see how we can thicken it.
Now you know when you've gone too far like here.
It looks a little much, so take it to about there and you may want to clean up your mids
a little bit just by sliding that slider.
See how it just gets rid of that yellowing?
And we don't care about the edges.
All I care about is the area there where the signature is.
Just play around until you get it looking about right.
I like that and then we're just going to click OK.
Now, all we need to do is just grab our Lasso Tool and just make a selection around the
signature, making sure that you're not getting any of these bad areas like that or that in
there.
All right, now we're going to convert it to a brush and we're just going to go up to Edit,
Define Brush Preset.
And we're going to create the Preset and you can see the size of the brush there.
It's going to be 2500 pixels.
That's really huge.
If you wanted to create a smaller logo, just use Image Size and you can do it that way.
So I'm going to do a full size and I'm going to click OK.
So, now, we've created a brush.
Now we want to go into our image here.
Here's a photograph that I did from my drone and I want put a nice signature watermark
on here, so I'm going to hit the B for Brush or just go down here in the toolbar, grab
the brush.
Make sure I've got white for the foreground.
Now, you could sign it with black or white, but in this case, I think white is going to
look really nice.
Then, we go up here and we're going to go to the very last one which is right there.
You can see that there and we're going to take a new layer and now we're just going
to move over.
You can see it's really huge there and you can also see the texture.
So I'm just going to hit the left bracket key to make it smaller or if it's really huge,
what you can do is go up here and just drop the size down to a reasonable level there.
And then, we can use the bracket keys to make it a little bigger or smaller.
I think I'm going to make this bigger than I normally would just so that we can see it
clearly, and then all I'm going to do is just click once to apply it.
And there we go, we applied that logo and you can see the organic nature of it.
Let me just hit the Move Tool and zoom in a little bit.
And see that you can see the texture there from that Bristol paper and from the pencil.
It creates a very natural, organic-looking watermark that you can use.
Now, if you want to save this to your creative cloud library for use later on, what we need
to do is just go to the Brushes and then what you want to do is choose the B just to make
the Brushes active and choose Brush Preset because you can't do it from the regular brushes.
You have to do it from the Brush Preset and that's it right there.
So just open up your Library and then just click and drag it into the Library and there
we go.
We've now got our signature brush available anywhere we like.
So there you have it.
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Add a comment.
Let's get a discussion going.
Do you like this kind of idea?
Do you watermark your photos or do you not watermark your photos?
I'd love to know what you think about it.
And until next time, I'll see you at the Cafe.