Photoshop Elements Tutorial: Creating a Watermark Brush

You may notice that most of the images I post on the blog have a watermark in the corner.  I do this for a couple of reasons, the main being that for some photos that I know might end up on Pinterest, I like my blog name in the photo so that in the event of a broken link, you can tell where the photo came from.

Watermarking in Photoshop Elements can be super easy. There are several ways to do it (I personally use an action that I found), but an easy one I can show you is to create a Photoshop brush.

First, create a blank file. (I'm working with Photoshop Elements 9 on a Mac).

Brushes can go up to 2500 x 2500 pixels, but for this you really only need it to be about 1000 pixels wide. Remember you can increase and decrease the sizes of brushes when you're using them.

Using your Text tool, choose your desired font and size, and I use black as my color. Type in your text. (On a Mac, hitting the "option" key plus the "G" key gets you the copyright symbol.

Once you have your text looking how you like (you could also put in an image here, by the way, whatever you want your watermark to look like), go to Edit/Define Brush. 

Choose a name for your brush and click OK.

 To use your brush, open up your photo, click your brush tool, and find your new watermark brush.

I change my color to white.

 And the opacity to 70% (but you can make this whatever you like - I just like mine to be faded a bit).

Adjust the size of your brush up or down by hitting the [ or ] keys. Then just click it on your photo where you'd like your watermark. Typically I choose the bottom right corner but some photos it looks better in other spots.

Now, to save your brush down to your hard drive (which I always recommend as a backup - I've had my entire brush palette disappear on me before), go to Edit/Preset Manager:

You'll see your brush in the palette:

Click on it then click "save set." (You could save multiple brushes that you've created of a similar theme all together in one set the same way - just make sure you've selected all the brushes you want).

Then just give your brush a name, choose your desired folder on your hard drive, and save.

If your brush ever got removed from your preset manager/brush palette, all you have to do to load them is go to Edit/Preset Manager/Load and choose the brush from your hard drive.

That's it! Simple, and makes watermarking your photos super quick.

I have more tutorials planned, but if there's anything you'd like to know how to do, please feel free to ask in the comments. I don't know everything but I'll do my best to answer your questions.