Making a transparent watermark file

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This is the third post about adding watermarks. Find the other two here: Four reasons you should use watermarks and Adding watermarks in one easy step.

In this post I’ll show you how to make a transparent watermark file in Gimp. I’ve mentioned .png files before and if you haven’t heard of those before, don’t worry. All you need to know for the purpose of this tutorial is that a .png is an image file type like .jpg (which you may be more familiar with). But unlike .jpg the .png supports transparent layers. And that is a very good thing when making a watermark file.

Compare the two watermarks in the image above, the top one is .jpg, the bottom one is .png. Although you could use a .jpg and maybe change the opacity of it, it is still a lot more.. in yer face than its transparent cousin .png.

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Right, open a new document in Gimp. The size doesn’t really matter as long as it is large enough for the size you want your watermark to be. You may want to make the watermark larger than you will need most of the time and then you can always make two or more different sizes.

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Click on the text tool, the ‘A’ marked with a circle here.

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Click inside your document and start typing whatever you want the text of your watermark to be. The text is automatically made into a new layer. Editing the text ‘content’ happens in a separate dialog box as you can see. To change the look of the text, use the Text tool box on the left: font, size, colour etc.

To move the text you can use the Text tool itself or the Move tool which looks like a cross with arrows on the ends. Marked with circle.

If you need to make extra changes to the text, double click on the ‘T’ icon for that layer in the layer box on the right.

When you’re happy with the look and content of your watermark, single-click on the ‘Background’ layer in the layer box and then delete it by clicking on the little bin icon (marked with yellow circle).

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Then use the crop tool, which looks like a knife (marked with pink circle) and drag a rectangle around the watermark text. Make the rectangle a bit larger than the actual watermark. Click in the middle of the watermark (or hit the Enter button on your keyboard) to crop the image.

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To save the watermark file, click on File > Save As and then type in name.png and hit Enter on the keyboard. You can of course give the watermark whatever name you like. :-)

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Once you’ve hit Enter you will first see the prompt on the left, click on Export. You will then see the prompt on the right, click on Save. And that’s your watermark saved!

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See, there it is! :-)

You can of course make a few watercolours in different colours if you want. And different sizes too.

xo, Carina

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