How to Watermark Digital Art Using GIMP

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By Regina Paul
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An example of a watermark on a piece of digital artwork.

GIMP is a wonderful free paint and photo editing software that does everything Photoshop does. You can even open Photoshop files with it. Anyone that creates digital art knows the dangers of having that digital art stolen by online thieves who then take your artwork and put it on products that they then sell. This is illegal but it does not stop online art thieves from doing it. Most of these online thieves are from overseas and it is very difficult to prosecute them and or get them to stop using your art to make money once they have stolen it. So, one of the things you can do to prevent this from happening is to put a watermark on your digital artwork. A watermark will make online art thieves think twice before stealing your digital artwork.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

A computer
An Internet connection
A copy of GIMP installed on your computer

Step 1

Open GIMP (see Resources below).
Step 2

Select the "File" drop down menu and then "Open." Find your digital art piece and select it.
Step 3

Select the "Layer" drop down menu and then "New Layer." Name your new layer “watermark.”
Step 4

Open your Layers palette by going to the "Dialog" drop down menu and selecting "Layers."
Step 5

Deselect your digital art layer by clicking on the eye next to it on the left.
Step 6

Select the new layer. Then from your tool box select the paint bucket and paint this layer white. Then select the "T" for text from your tool box, and select black for the color of your text and type your copyright information where you’d like it to appear on your digital art.
Step 7

Go to your "Filters" drop down menu, select "Distorts" and then "Emboss."
Step 8

Reselect your digital art layer and your watermark layer (you will notice that GIMP puts your text on a separate layer). Now you will want to select your text layer and change the mode to "Hard Light." Then for your watermark layer change the mode to "Overlay." You should then be able to see your text on your digital art, although it will be faint.
Step 9

Now you will want to save your picture. Select "File," then "Save As" and you will get a window saying that your image must be exported before it can saved as a jpeg, then it will say jpeg can’t handle transparency and you’ll see a message suggesting "Flatten Image." Just go ahead and click on "Export." It will ask you what size you want to save the picture as and I always say 100, as this is full size and looks best.

Comments

chilichocolate said

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on 10/26/2009 Also, don't forget to either do (A) a "save as" using a new name [eg: if your original file name was myimage01.jpg, you could add a suffic such as "-w" for watermark: myimage01-w.jpg so that you can see it's the smae image but with a watermark on it] or (B) save the file in a new librairy for your watermarked images [you can also choose to add either a prefix such as "w-" or a suffix as above to avoid any possibility of confusion. This helps with data management when you have thousands of photos!

calebstacks10 said

on 7/26/2009 I do not understand how to get my text where I want it and I do not know how to do the hard light. Could u explain those few steps to me? Thanks

reginapaul said

on 2/12/2009 Okay, I'm confused, there is an example picture of a piece of digital artwork that I created and that I used GIMP to put a watermark on. BigDiamonds, not sure what else you are referring to here, could you be a little more specific? That would help and I'll try to accomodate you. :-)