How to Add a Watermark to a JPEG Image

Video Transcript

"Hi, My name is Dave Andrews, Today I'm going to show you how to add a watermark to a jpeg image. A watermark in an image typically will let you distribute an image without somebody making copies if it, that you might want to be distributed. This way you can protect your own personal property and still distribute an image that somebody can use as a sample. So let's go to the computer. To create this watermark I'm going to use a program called Gimp, which is freely downloadable from Gimp.org. Let's launch Gimp and open up the jpeg image that I want to add the watermark to. Click on file, go to open, and on our desktop I have a file called bluehills.jpg, let's select it. Now to add the watermark, go to your layers, channels, and patterns window, and select the create a new layer and add it to the image button. This is going to create a new layer on top of the blue hills that is transparent. We can draw on that layer and the blue hills themselves won't be affected. So select transparency, press ok. Now lets add our watermark. I'm going to just grab the text tool, change my size to be very large and click. I'm just going to say Dave Andrews, save, close. Now that watermark is very brilliant and blocks the blue hills. A watermark should not be so much that you can't see what's underneath it, that's why it's called a watermark. So let's make that Dave Andrews a little bit transparent. Select the Dave Andrews layer, lets just drag the opacity down. So as you can see the watermark is still visible, and somebody who might want to steal this image and use it for something else won't be able to edit out that Dave Andrews. Let's save our watermark image, go to file, save as, and then on our desktop lets call it blue hills watermark and save. Since we have multiple layers we'll need to export this to a flat image. Now if we close the Gimp and open up blue hills watermark, we will see our watermarked image. This can be a very effective tool for distributing images that you don't want to be copied. My name is Dave Andrews and I just showed you how to add a watermark to a jpeg file."