Many photographers want to use a watermark in their images to protect these from illegal use. A good watermark is very difficult to remove, even with the ‘content-aware’ tools in Photoshop, yet does not deface the image. There are different ways of achieving that goal, but I like the following Photoshop method best. It’s quick and easy, gives great results and can even be used to make a watermark export template for applications like Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and Apple Aperture.

Enter your text (I chose white as text color, but the text color is irrelevant for the end result) and make it big and bold enough to cover lots of image detail. Go to the Layer Styles and add a Bevel and Emboss style and a Drop Shadow style.

Watermark-1

Now set the Fill of the text layer to zero. This will make the text itself invisible (hence the irrelevance of the color), only the layer styles remain. If the layer styles are still too obtrusive, lower the Opacity of the layer to whatever gives a good result. I used 30% because that makes the watermark hardly visible, but visible enough to deter people from copying the image.

Watermark-2

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