Watermarking is a great way to reduce (but not eliminate) theft of your images and add a little bit of marketing value to those images. If you choose to watermark your images, the key is to have it such that it causes as little distraction to your image as possible whilst retaining good legibility. Using open source software, we will look at how to easily and effectively create a reusable watermark for your images. Download the GIMP, grab an image and follow along.
Step 1
Load the file you want to into GIMP.
Step 2
Click on the text tool. Check the “use editor” option and select your desired font and size. Now click on the image where you would like the watermark to appear. Type your text into the GIMP Text Editor.
Step 3
Duplicate the newly created text layer (“(c) yourname” in the example). By clicking on the overlapping squares icon on the Layers dialogue box.
Step 4
We now want to change the text colour of the top most of the newly duplicated text layer. This is done by selecting that layer (so that it is highlighted) and select the text tool as we did in Step 1. Now click on the text once then select the colour from the text tool options. You will be presented with a dialogue box called "Text Color". Here we choose the colour white. There are many ways to do this but I find specifying the HTML colour of #ffffff to be the easy and accurate. The colour of the text should now turn white. If not, chances are you did not have the top text layer selected.
Step 5
On your current layer (should be top layer) select layer to image size from the layer menu on the main window (Layer>Layer to Image Size). Repeat from the other text layer.
Step 6
Select the second text layer (ie: the text layer between the top text layer and your image). Now from your menu on your main window select Layer>Transform>Offset or hold down Shift+Control+O to bring up the offset layer dialogue. The values we want are 0.1% for the x and y values (remember to select % first otherwise you'll most likely be working in pixels!)
Step 7
While still on that second or lower text layer (and if you are not on that layer then something has gone wrong somewhere along the way), we will blur it a little. We do this by Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur. The values we want the blur to be will vary upon the size of text used and the original image size but a good rule of thumb is you want the blur radius to be about 10% of the font size as measured by pixels. In this example it would yield a blur radius of 17 pixels. I usually just run with a value of 15 pixels and that seems to work out quite nicely.
Step 8
Select the top layer by left clicking it. Now right click the top layer and select Merge Down.
Step 9
Finally, adjust the opacity of the top layer to make the watermark unobtrusive yet legible. I usually find 25% works most of the time.
Final Thoughts
So why go to all this trouble? Why not just stop after Step 2? Firstly, your photograph will look a lot more professional by following the above steps. Secondly, your watermark will be highly legible yet unobtrusive. Let us look at the below example
I've cherry picked the worst location to put a watermark on the image to highlight some of the problems inherent in just typing your watermark into a layer and leaving it at that. If the photo wasn't so over exposed they the black text would blend into the black of the costume. But hiding the lower layer and exporting the watermark as a png file, you now have a file you can import as the top most layer on any photo.
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