Tutorial to Create a Bordered Watermark Action

OK, someone asked me how to create an action in Photoshop to create a bordered watermark for your image. I put this together in about 15 min so it's really basic but hopefully it helps.

Basically I'll edit an image doing all your usual post-processing stuff to the RAW-outputted TIFF file. I'll save the TIFF file and then run my save for Web action which you'll see below. This gives me an image sized for the Web with a nice border and logo watermark.

• Find an image
  http://www.imagineTNT.​com …atermark/waterm​ark_01.jpg

• Do all your normal edits/airbrushing/etc. (I'm not showing all that in this tutorial for simplicity)
  
• Create a new action
  http://www.imagineTNT.​com …atermark/waterm​ark_02.jpg
  
• Select your new action and start recording your steps
  http://www.imagineTNT.​com …atermark/waterm​ark_03.jpg
  
• Flatten the image
  http://www.imagineTNT.​com …atermark/waterm​ark_04.jpg
  
• Resize the image to your desired size (600x400)
  
• Create a new layer
  http://www.imagineTNT.​com …atermark/waterm​ark_04.jpg
  
• Reset the swatches
  
• Select the entire image
  
• Create a 1px border out of the selection
  (Select->Modify->Border)
  http://www.imagineTNT.​com …atermark/waterm​ark_05.jpg
  
• Fill selection with white to create white border
  http://www.imagineTNT.​com …atermark/waterm​ark_06.jpg
  
• Select the picture layer
  
• Resize the image canvas to 640x440
  
• Fill the empty border with your border color (black)
  http://www.imagineTNT.​com …atermark/waterm​ark_07.jpg
  
• Use the File->Place action to place an Illustrator logo onto your image
  
• http://www.imagineTNT.​com …atermark/waterm​ark_08.jpg
  
• Stop recording the action.
  
• You now have an action to use whenever you want!

• **** I guess I didn't mention this in the original tutorial but when you're creating the action the first step should be to flatten the image. ******
  
• tinker around and figure out all the steps for creating an action before you actually stop recording. Before is when to figure out how big to make your border, logo, etc.
  
• You can always hit stop on recording
  
• You can delete steps if you mess up
  
• I have two actions to create Web-ready photos. One for landscape oriented photos and one for portrait oriented photos. (If anyone knows how to get Photoshop to conditionally choose based on the image size that'd be sweet to know!)
  
• I also created a sharpen layer in the middle of those steps but based on the technique above you can basically do anything you want
  
• You can call other actions within an action itself.

Wow, great tutorial. Had never tried this before, followed the steps and had it working on the first shot thanks a bunch, Man how sweet it is.

Awesome! Glad that worked out for you

ImagineTNT, quick question.. everything i understand except to this part: "Resize the image canvas to 640x440" how do you know how much to resize it by? for example if you were working with a 800x600 image.. how much would i resize it? i tried doing 805x605.. but the border is HUGE. please help. thanks!

G6, that's just something you have to play around with until you get a border that suits your taste. I took a 600x400 image and resized it to 640x440 to get a 20px border. I just messed around until I found something I liked.

Thanks for doing this one. Currently I use 2 actions to do this, one for the border and one for my watermark. But would really like just one action so I think I will give this one a go in the weekend.

Yep I use that type of border too. I think the white on mine is 1 pixel and the black part is 30. So when I resize my photo before adding the border I resize it to 738 on the longest edge then when adding the border it will be 800.


We need more tutorials like this.

If all you're doing is run action #1 and then run action #2 what you can do is create action #3 which as "actions" run action 1 and then and 2.

Yeah but I will most likely redo the watermark anyway because I need to change the text. It is just a simple text reading "(C) 2005 Tommy Jensen" and I have to correct the year every time I use it so I will maybe create a few "logos" so I just add that and don't need to change the year more than once a year.

sweet... i got it to work now. how about if you want ur watermark to be on the lower right hand corner.. how would u go about in doing that?

now, can someone post a tutorial on how to create ur own logo??? sorry for the noob question.

When recording your action you just place the logo wherever you want it in the image. If you place it in the upper left it will always go in the upper left.

As for making a logo..... that's like asking for a tutorial on taking photos

ImagineTNT wrote:
As for making a logo..... that's like asking for a tutorial on taking photos

Hehe yeah. Thats why when I needed a logo to my website (non-photography) I simply asked here (in general talk) if anybody could help me create one. Several did a marvoulous job and I got 3 or 4 different logos to choose from.

Thanks Ruben!

This is great!

Now I have my first homemade action!

Comment/ Suggestion:
To get it to work on any size image Horiz or Vert just resize the image boarder by selecting a Percentage rather than Pixels. 103-105% seem to work well.

Question:
I would prefer a title rather than a logo on the bottom of my pictures. For now I will just add a text layer and end the action here. This way I can just type whatever and then flaten and save.

But...

Is there a way to get PS to extract it from the filename? or even the date and other details from the EXLF data?

Good idea Unfortunately I've still got to use two actions as my original resize is dependent on horizontal/vertical...

embdude wrote:
Question:
I would prefer a title rather than a logo on the bottom of my pictures. For now I will just add a text layer and end the action here. This way I can just type whatever and then flaten and save.

But...

Is there a way to get PS to extract it from the filename? or even the date and other details from the EXLF data?

Hmmm, I'm sure it's possible but I've never done that before.

Well you could resize using the percentage too! But hey 2 actions isn't really so bad.


I will re-ask my question in a new post and we shall see...

Im here to revive this thread with my BIG Q! lol

Well my first try using the border tutorial went well

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