How To Make Your Own Photography Logo and Watermark

Hi everybody, Matt Kloskowski here. And in this tutorial, we're going to take a look at how to kind of put your own type of a logo or watermark onto your photos, really how to create one to put onto your photos. That's really the bulk of this video. There's lots of videos on how to actually put it onto your photos. I want to show you how to create a very, a great looking logo watermark nameplate and a very unique one. Cause I've got some tips that even if somebody picks the same font family as you do, you can still make yours very, very different from everybody else's. So in this age of digital sharing, a lot of people like to leave their mark on their photos and we can get into debates on whether you should sign and is it okay to sign and all that stuff. This tutorial is not for that, or it's not for you, if that's what you want to talk about. If you're just looking for a creative way to leave a mark on your photos, I think I got a tutorial for you. Let's go ahead and dive in. All right. So the very first thing we have to do is create yourself a blank document to host. This just come up here to file new. Um, as far as sizing goes for this document, you know, there is no governing body for how big it should be. It should be as big as you think you could ever want to use it for. All right. So how big do you share images? Typically it's not going to be the whole size of the image. It'll be smaller, but if you make it the largest size of the photo that you have, you can always make it smaller. It's just harder to make it bigger later on. All right. So, uh, 3000 pixels is a good, a good gauge for, uh, for what I did. I did about 3000 height. Doesn't really matter. You got plenty of height to work with. So once we get our blank document here, um, we're going to go over to the school box and press T or select the horizontal type tool from the toolbox. And we have to choose a font. So I'll give you a, I'll give you a couple of places here, one place. And my, my preferred place, which is going to be fonts.adobe.com. If you're a creative cloud subscriber, you have access to thousands of fonts for free. And the nice thing is, is they sync right to Photoshop. It's literally a matter of going to a website, um, making sure you're signed into your Adobe creative cloud account. And you, you actually just click to, to activate a font. All right. You don't have to do anything. You don't have to install. You don't have to download. It's all done for you. Uh, if you can't find that you'd go to fonts.adobe.com. You can also go to your creative cloud application manager. Normally where you update all of your apps. And one of the options over there is fonts, and then you can manage and browse your fonts there as well. So you can search through their script. Um, you can put your sample text in there and get a feel for it. There's just, there's so many fonts in there and so many nice ones as well. So that is an option. Another option. If you're not a creative cloud subscriber, or if you can't find one that you like, uh, one of the websites that I use is dafont, D-A-F-O-N-T, dafont.com. And again, you can search through for the style that you're looking for your logo or watermark based on, um, some of the different options they have in here. So some really cool ones inside of there as well. You'll just have to download and install it. Um, you know, they've got installations for how to install a font. And if you can't figure that out, best thing to do is just, uh, Google it, uh, for your operating system. Cause it could be different for, uh, or a little bit different for each operating. Okay. So once you're back there, we're going to grab our type tool. I'm going to click. And, uh, and I chose, I chose a font called Anthony signature. Okay. And again, just you can do a quick Google search to find out where, uh, to find out where you can grab that font. It was a free font that you're able to download. And, um, and so I use that font called Anthony signature. I thought it looked pretty cool. Um, as soon as you click, depending on what version of Photoshop you use, it may kind of give you lorem ipsum text. All you got to do. It doesn't even require another click. You just start typing and it goes away. Okay. Just like that. All right. When you're done, hit that little check box up at the top, take your move tool. You can kind of move it into place here. Now the next step, the next step is really important because this, in fact, the next two steps are really important because this is what's going to separate yours from everybody else's out there that might even choose this font. You know, they might choose the same font, but this is where you can get really creative with this stuff. So step number one is you have to control the spacing between the letters, right? Every font's going to be a little bit different, but we go to our, our, uh, our type tool here. What I can do, notice how these letters are supposed to connect. Now, creatively, you might not want them to, and you don't have to, right? It's, I've seen options where it looks good both ways, but I decided I want them to connect together almost like it was handwriting. So what I do is I take my cursor and I put it between the two letters there, and we're going to go up here to the window character menu, which is going to open up a whole new palette there. And there's a setting inside of there that's called kerning. And that's the space between any two characters. So I put my, my cursor between the L and the O. I can put my cursor into that little kerning area there, and I can press the down arrow key and you'll see it brings them closer together. Again, I can do the same thing. And sometimes it automatically sticks to the next setting. So I can make it a little bit easier for you there. The other thing that if that's not working, or it's a little, for me personally, it's a little bit easier. I'll put my cursor between the two letters and the keyboard shortcut for that is the option or alt key and then the left and right arrows. Right makes it go to the right, left makes it go to the left, exactly how you think it would work. Same thing, just move my cursor in between, my cursor in between. I'm just using the arrow keys to move it in between there. And I'll just tighten up the space to make those letters connect. Some, you know, again, the space between the L and the K, you can bring that in really close and tight. If you want to, you can spread it out a little bit. If you want to, that's going to be totally based on the look that you want. All right, from here, I'm going to go to the space between the two T's and I'm going to do that option alt right arrow key. I'm going to spread them apart. Why am I spreading them apart? Spreading them apart because I don't like how there's two crosses. The, the two T's were crossed differently. I would normally, I think a lot of people, when you have two T's next to each other, just do one cross going, just one going across both of the T's there. I can't do that with this font, the way that it is. So this is, this is where you can get super creative with this stuff and very, and make a very unique type of signature logo mark, name mark that, that is your own. And that's different from everybody else's because you can customize this stuff. Let's hit that little check box at the top. Next thing we want to do is we can't, we can't do this on the text layer, the way that it stands, right? We have to convert this text layer to a shape layer. So you're just going to come up here to the type menu, and then you're going to go down to convert to shape. It's still infinitely scalable. I can still make this as big or as small as I want and back and forth, and I won't ever lose quality. It's just not editable anymore. It's not editable text anymore. And I know there's, there's a hundred of you screaming at your computer right now. You're the non-destructive police and you're saying, but now it is destructive. You have destroyed the photo because now I can't go back and change the type layer in case I need to. Guess what? If you misspelled your name, you got bigger problems than working about and worrying about non-destructive. So it is not that non-destructive. And at this point, this is nothing I would ever want to be non-destructive. So now that we have access to this, we can do all kinds of changes to the specific letters and get very unique and creative. And before we do that, we do have a quick word from our sponsor, which as you may have guessed is always me. Um, and I just wanted to let you know, I have a, uh, I have a course out there. It's actually kind of a tool kits course toolkits called the photographer's logo and watermark toolkit. Um, so it's not only just videos, but actually comes with templates and fonts that dives a little bit more into what I'm doing here. So number one, I talk about the tools a little bit more kind of little, the nuances and how you can, how you can make and use these tools to your advantage. I talk about font choice. Okay. A lot of people aren't designers and I want to give you fonts that work together and how to work together so that you kind of have a winning combination there. Um, and then the, the bulk of what's done inside the toolkit when it comes to the videos is I show you how to make it unique. And this came from two things. One, I see a lot of people that use that, that, that crappy little copyright symbol and just blah text next to it. I don't want you to be that person. Okay. It's ugly. You take a great looking photo and you throw that next to it and it does not look good. Number two, there are people that have had them designed. There were a couple of places that do this. And the, the problem is, is that they all start to kind of look together. I even had it done and I think it looks great. And if you want to go that route, I think it's, it's really good for people that don't want to get their hands dirty and roll up their sleeves and do it on the computer. But if you're the kind that wants to learn a little bit more about how, you know, Photoshop ticks with this stuff and then what you can do, I think the possibilities open up. Okay. There's so many great looking fonts out there. You can get something that's really tuned to your style. And the best part is I think human nature, after we see something of ours, two or three months, six months, we get tired of it. You don't have to pay for another one. You'll have the tools, you'll be equipped to go in there and change yours and to kind of update it and make it your own as things change and as your tastes change over time. Okay. So there are templates that are included. It's, it's got something for everybody. It's got a lot of signature style stuff if you want it to look like a signature, but it's also got things for nameplates. If you just don't necessarily want a signature, you want more of a logo mark or a nameplate on there. It's got a little bit of something for both that includes fonts, 20 templates, put them together. You get thousands of possibilities in there. So hopefully yours will not look like somebody else's. And then it finishes up with showing you how to use it. So you can see how to use it inside of Photoshop, but I think most people will want to be able to use it inside a Lightroom or you can either use it on a print or you can batch export a whole bunch of photos with your watermark already on top of it. Okay. You can obviously find out more over at my website. I'll make sure I put a link into the description, mattk.com. Let's get back to our tutorial. Okay. So we are back. Uh, we left off where we had converted this to a shape layer, and now we can go in here and change things. So we're going to go to, it's going to get a little bit weird. We're going to go to the tool right below the type tool. It's this little arrow tool, but you have to click and hold on it. All right. Because we have converted our, our text basically to a, a path. We don't want the path selection tool. We want the one, we want the one right below it, the white arrow. It's the direct selection tool. And what we're going to do is just click off in empty space for now, commander control plus to zoom in space bar key, move it around a little bit, go back over here. We got our direct selection tool. And now what we're going to do is we're going to click and drag. I've now selected these little anchor points. That's what makes up a path. All right. I'm not going to get too much into it, but I've now selected those and I'm going to hit the delete key and they're gone. Now I'm going to go over here, select those guys, hit delete, and they're gone. Now I'm going to click off into empty space again, and I'm now going to click in that corner and I'm just going to drag down, click in that corner and drag down. I'm doing something pretty simple here, but if you didn't like the shape of a layer, a letter, if you wanted to extend, modify, warp, whatever, there are so many things you can do now that we have access to the text this way. So it'd be a lot of fun too. Now I'm going to take that T and I'm going to click, drag, select around it, and then I can use my left or right arrow keys. I can bring it in, just move it around, right? Throw the shift key into the left and right arrow keys and it will move in larger increments too. So now I got my two T's together. Last thing I would say from here is let's click, drag, select the last name. And then again, hold down shift, left arrow key, and just kind of nudge this in, bring that a little bit tighter. Okay. And again, just click off of it to deselect so that you're not working with that anymore. And now select your move tool. Now you have this on its own layer. You're ready to do whatever you want with it. From here, one more thing that I would do is throw in a little bit of a tagline to this. So let's select our type tool, T for the type tool. I'm going to go up here and I know one of my favorite ones is this Athelas font. It's a serif font. You don't want to mix script fonts. So you would never do two different script fonts for this. So you're going to do something serif, non or sans serif. I like the Athelas for this. I was going to type in the word photography, select that, make it much, much smaller. Use my move tool, bring it into place here, command or control T for free transform, make it even smaller. And you can move it around position. Everybody's name is going to be different where this fits for your name. You could put it up at the top. You could put it in here. You could put it in. I mean, there's so many different permutations of how you could do this, that it's impossible to give you a formula other than fit it into a nice place. It shouldn't be that big. All right. You don't necessarily want it to be like that. All right. You want this to be small. And then what we're going to do is we're going to go in and we have our type layer selected. Um, I'm just going to double click on that type layer, the T over here, which selects all the letters. And I'm going to go back to that character palette again, window character. And this time I'm going to use the tracking setting and put my cursor into that little text box there and hit the up arrow key. And now I'm just going to spread the letters out. So I'm not making the letters bigger. I'm making the space between them bigger so that it fills that space underneath. There looks a little bit more professional, a little bit more symmetrical as it keeps with the size of the name there. Okay. Last thing we are, we are ready to use this. Um, from here we could, you know, we could select all and copy. We could do whatever we want, an easy way to use this on your photos or anywhere. Really. Let's first go ahead and turn off the background layer, right? We don't want that white background. And then I go to select all, which puts a selection around everything. And then I'm going to come up here to edit, go down to define brush preset. We're going to turn this into a brush and I'm going to call this Matt's name plate. Click. Okay. We have now created a brush for this. It's going to live in your brushes panel. So when we press B for the brush tool and we come up here and when we click through, you'll see your, the brushes you just created down there at the bottom and you can control the size and everything. Um, it's, you generally would never want to make it bigger than it is right now because that's the size of the document that you created. But 2000 pixels is pretty darn big. And then from here, we just go over to a photo. So let's go over here to this photo. Um, you're going to make yourself a new layer to put this on. Go ahead and press B for your brush tool. Uh, you can hit your left and your right bracket keys and that'll make it larger or smaller. And then you would choose a color based on your, what color would work for the photo. Black really wouldn't work for this photo. So I would make sure I chose white. Remember, we have a new layer for this and then all I got to do is just click and you'll see there, it puts it right on to the photo. Switch over to the move tool. Now we can move this around command or control T and we can make it larger or smaller, tuck it off into a corner if we wanted to. And then a lot of times you may find it helpful to even reduce the opacity a little bit. Um, if you think it's going to be a little bit too obtrusive into the photo, uh, just pull that opacity down a little bit and kind of fade it into the background. Okay. So folks, I hope you enjoyed this tutorial here. There is lots of creative opportunities when it comes to something like this. It's just a, uh, it's just a fun way to put your personal mark onto a photo, especially since so much is being shared digitally today. So, uh, I hope you guys enjoyed it. And, uh, if you do, uh, or are interested, please check out my, uh, logo and watermark toolkit course, uh, comes with templates. And I do a lot of the work for you and finding good fonts and, uh, you know, kind of give you a headstart with some of those templates, but also they're really the bulk of all the videos that come with it are showing you how to customize it, showing you how to go in, make it your own. Even if you end up choosing a font that other people chose, uh, how to go in and make those, make the letters and make everything about your logo, your name plate, your watermark, how to make it unique, really good looking and how to make it something that, you know, looks a little bit different from everybody else's.