Custom Watermark Tutorial - J. Rinaldi Photography

After many attempts at creating a working action to add a custom watermark to my pictures (and I tried all the tutorials, from books and online), I came up with this method, follow it through and you'll end up with an action that will always place your logo where you want in the same size (relative to image size) no matter which orientation you use.

A PDF version of the tutorial is also available here

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If you wish to hand draw you logo, or if you wish to use your signature, take a piece of clean, heavy white printing paper or index card.

Design your logo, you can also use any graphic you have already generated, preferably black and white, since color info will be discarded later.

Take out your camera and set up your newly drawn design in a place with nice even lighting. Take a couple of pictures, try to shoot raw and expose to the right, we actually want the hightlight to be close to blown.

Use your RAW processor to adjust white balance, increase contrast and bring those highlights far into the right.

Open your logo in Photoshop and change to image mode to 'grayscale'

Open your logo in Photoshop and change to image mode to 'grayscale'. If you didn't or couldn't shoot RAW, use photoshop's controls to increase the contrast and blow your highlights.

Tidy up your logo in anyway you want, erase stray marks, you can also add text (copyright so and so) at this point so that it gets vectorized along with the graphic.

Select the magic wand from the tool palette.

Use the magic wand tool (or masking) to select all the white regions in the picture. If you have text at this point be mindfull to select the white spaces inside letter, otherwise it'll look weird when placing into a document.