How to Watermark and Protect your Designs

Here you will come to know how to protect your designs from thieves and plagiarists. Below is the logo we will use for the purpose of this tutorial. As you can see, this logo is pretty much unprotected and could easily be stolen.

We will begin by creating a new canvas and adding the word 'SAMPLE' using the 'Horizontal Type Tool' . Now we have the text sorted out select the 'Rectangular Marquee Tool'  and drag around the text below.

Now go to 'Image' and select 'Crop'. This will cut out all the unnecessary white space.

To make the watermark look more professional we will need to slope the text. Press 'CTRL+T' to 'Free Transform' the text and hold down the top right anchor point and spin it until the text is at a slope like the one below.

Now delete the white background layer to leave only the text and a transparent background as shown below.

We are now going to make this into a Pattern. To do this click on 'Edit' and 'Define Pattern'. This will bring up the Pattern Name Box. Give it the name watermark.psd and click ok.

Our watermark pattern has now been created. Now go back to the original logo design canvas. Create a new layer on top of all the other layers. Here we will call it 'Layer2'.

Now go to 'Edit' and select 'Fill'. Click the 'Custom Pattern' button to select the pattern you previously created called 'watermark.psd'. Make sure the 'Opacity' is set to 10% and click ok.

Your logo design is now watermarked and protected. The watermarking method show above can be applied to any Adobe Photoshop design. It could be a logo, template, poster or anything. The end result should look something like the image below.