Creating a Text Watermark in Pixlr

Welcome to our first Art Tip Tuesday series. For now we'll do Art Tip Tuesdays every first Tuesday of the month. Later on we may do it bimonthly, but for now this is all we'll have time to jolly for. This month's topic is watermarking with text in Pixlr, a free program online. We'll touch on more watermarking tutorials later, and you're always welcome to ask questions in the comments for clarifying anything that may seem a little confusing.

If you're just starting out as an artist of any sort, a photographer, a painter, a digital illustrator there are sometimes concerns about how to protect your images on the internet. Marking them as your own is important when the information superhighway is traveling at light speed. Things get missed. I've stumbled upon tons of artwork or photography on the internet that is absolutely gorgeous. I want to find the artist or photographer.

While you think it would be a no-brainer for someone to source where they found the piece from, sometimes that just doesn't happen. People who are not artists or photographers sometimes don't think about that. Sometimes people who aren't artists don't think about the time that is put into any kind of art piece, and so will not realize that it's important to source everything.

As a result these beautiful pieces are lost to the internet as far as who they originated from.

A watermark is different to many people. It can be just a little logo or text that you simply place in the corner of the image so it's sourced permanently. Or sometimes it's a blaring thing that covers the entire photo. I've gone back and forth on whether or not I want to watermark my work for a long time. But after I had a potential customer post one of my works and ask who's work it was because they forgot who it was I realized just how important it was to me and my business to include my information, however small on my work.

While I started out watermarking, I've now gone to using low-res files with little copyright information that lines the piece. That way if someone saves it off the internet, they'll be able to do a quick search and just find me easily.

Art thieves are a whole 'nother story. If someone is going to steal your piece and claim it as their own, unfortunately watermarks are only so effective. There are art thieves out there who can indeed remove watermarks. And while it takes a bit of work, it can still happen even if your watermark is plastered in every which direction on the image. Even if your watermark is opaque. In this case, just display low-resolution files if you're a little leery about it and keep your original high-resolution file safely tucked away for your use only. Watermarks just sort of keep the majority of art thievery at bay.

Watermarking is a very simple thing to do once you figure it out. You can use a myriad of programs to do this, depending on how you want it to look. The first thing you want to do is find a logo. Or a photo, or a piece of text, or really whatever you want to use to watermark with. Your name, company name, logo, whatever. As long as it's a graphic you can use it.

Let's show you what to do a text watermark in pixlr. Pixlr is a free program online. I really like this program, it's pretty comparable if you have nothing else to use. A few cons on this one is you can really only use the fonts that are available in the program. And if you don't have a "Are you sure you want to close this tab/window/etc" function on your browser--you can lose a lot of work. SAVING is super important with this program because it does not prompt you to save before you close. It's also a little more tricky, although not impossible to rotate text for the beginner layer user. If you're using a logo graphic that you already have doodled up, then it's awesome.

First go to www.pixlr.com. You'll be greeted by a few pretty-looking options. Click on the butterfly option, Pixlr Editor. You'll get the best options here for editing etc. I really like having such a good working program for free that I can access anywhere. Can't beat free! No downloads necessary.

After this lovely little step you're going to get options on what  you'd like to do, create a new file, open from your computer, or even open from an existing URL, which I'm pretty partial to when I'm not home and have a link to an image from my photo storage or website that I'd like to use. It's totally up to you to do what you're doing in this stage. I usually use the open from computer or URL.

For this tutorial, I'll just go with "Open image from computer".

Here's my little file I opened, below. The red-footed tortoise doodle I've done. Let's watermark it! Now, you'll notice on the right hand side there are a few little windows that are open. There is the Tools window on the left, and on the right the Navigator, layers and history. I don't really use the navigator. In fact, I've never used it. It just sits there. The layers is a window that we're going to focus on in this tutorial.

Layers!? What are layers. A layer is exactly what it sounds like. A layer of your work. When you open an image in JPEG, PNG or GIF format, you're going to have one layer. You can add layers, delete layers and also move layers so some are above others or below others. These layers are transparent, except for the stuff that you put on it. Be it a logo, text, or even a line that you draw. You can see I only have one layer open in the above graphic. It's the image itself. And it's locked. You can tell it's locked by the little padlock that shows on the right side of the later that is selected. For this tutorial, let's just keep it locked since you probably aren't going to be messing with that layer if you're just watermarking.

A watermark will need to be on a separate layer than your image. This way you can move it around and place it where you want. So, first things first, let's create a text watermark. It's as simple as selecting the text tool on the tool window and clicking on your image. It's the little "A".

So, click on your image now that you've got your text tool selected. There's going to be a new dialog window that shows up labelled Text. Type in what you'd like to use as your text. Choose the color you'd like your text watermark to be. White is the best option, because it will show up on nearly everything. Except of course, if white is the primary color on your image. In this case, go with a darker color. You can also choose your font, size of text and style. The size of your text is pretty limited on Pixlr. You can only go so high, so if you need it to be pretty big you're probably going to have to find another program to use. Once you're through choosing the size, color, etc of your text watermark click OK. You can always make changes to the text options later. You'll also notice that on the right, in your layers window there's a new layer. It's your text layer. Make sure this layer is on the top, so it shows up above any other layer.

Ok, so now you have two layers, your text and your background, or image layer. You want to make your watermark a little more.. clear, right? More like what a watermark looks like, traditionally. So now look at your layers window again. At the bottom left of the layers window there's this weird looking box with arrows on it. Click that.

Opacity comes up in your layers window. Make sure you have your text layer selected, and change your opacity level from 100 to somewhere closer to 35-45. Leave the mode normal. You can play around with modes if you like, but for simplicity, normal is fine. That makes your text watermark a little more clear so you can still see the image below, but have it marked with text. Your opacity changes the opaqueness of the watermark. Higher opacity makes it more opaque, lower opacity makes it less opaque.

Now, let's say you want to tilt your text. Before you attempt this, make sure your text is exactly how you want it to be by color, spelling etc. In Photoshop it's very easy to tilt and also edit, but in Pixlr it a little bit more tricky. Once you tilt your text you cannot edit the text again in Pixlr.

Before you can tilt your text, you need to rasterize the text layer. That pretty much means you're changing the layer from a text layer to an image layer. You can do this by selecting the text layer you want to rasterize, right clicking it and clicking "Rasterize layer" from the menu. Your layer is then rasterized and has changed to an "image" layer.

Perfect. For the next step I recommend selecting your move tool from the tool menu. It's the top right little arrow in the tool menu. After you've selected that, click on the Edit menu at the top of the screen. Not the Edit menu from your web browser, though. If you see two Edit menu options, choose the lowest Edit. Then click on Free transform. This'll put a little box around your watermark.

 Below you can see the box that goes around your watermark:

Now you can rotate it. Hold your cursor towards the outside of the little box around your text watermark, click and rotate it however you like. You can also make the text a little bigger once you have the layer transformed. When you're done changing the tilt, size, etc of your watermark just hit the Enter key and you will get a dialog box that asks if you want to apply the changes. If so, click yes and  your rotation or size changes will take place. You can Free Transform your watermark as many times as you want to change the tilt or size. Mind, changing the size of the text once your layer is rasterized will make it look pixellated and lose quality.

There you have it for the text portion in Pixlr. A lot of these same basic principals can be used in Photoshop or other layer programs. For an image watermark, instead of a text layer you use an image layer. Simply open your image and drag it onto the picture you'd like to watermark. Change the opacity for that layer and you can also change the size of that layer the same way you do for the text. IMPORTANT: Be sure you save your newly watermarked image as a NEW file. Rename it. You don't want to save a watermark over your original file. For any other questions or clarifications feel free to post a comment, as I check them regularly. :) If there's a tutorial you'd like to see next month, let me know! Hopefully soon I can do a little speed drawing too so you can all see how I doodle my doodles.

Happy sticking! And happy watermarking!