How to Watermark Photos and Make an Action in Photoshop

I know there has been some discussion lately amongst bloggers about Pinterest and how to protect your property.  Yes, Pinterest does save the original source and it does send people to your blog, but there is one problem.  In the last week, I suddenly noticed a whole bunch of photos from my blog on Pinterest that were not showing my blog address, but a really weird url, like https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiqLqdj2zizzUj1ffHtzdfoGSSvg52hVlkCJqZEYvPJLKZ-653LrmzjRJB_Rmoj3eR8U34r06_3qs-qCP3X0Ci0zSbdZAqG5nhvGDU7XaZj2l1CvWH2V275K8evPK0lUvZsO-aRMUbXBo/s1600/DSC_0222.JPG.  I think this happens when someone pins an image after clicking it to enlarge in a new window.  I am going to try to start adding a watermark or copyright notation on photos I post (this may not happen all the time) and thought I would try a little tutorial on how to make the process a little quicker.

What is with this weird url?

If you have Photoshop, it is super easy to mark your photos.  You can create an "action" so that after you do each step once and save it, you can apply the action to automatically mark other photos.  If you have a program like Adobe Bridge, you can even batch edit to mark a whole folder's worth of images at once.  *I'm sure there are ways to batch edit with other programs so if you don't have the same program as me, just do a quick search and I'm sure you'll get plenty of results.

Recording an Action to Watermark a Photo in Photoshop

Enlarge for arrows that point to the different tools.

1. Open up a photo that you want to watermark in Photoshop.
2. In your Actions window, create a new action.
3. Name your action.  I chose "Blog Watermark".
4. Make sure your action is recording.  The little circle at the bottom of your actions window should be red.
5. Create a text layer and type in whatever you want.  I typed Katie Morris ArtTeacherAdventures.blogspot.com.
6. Adjust the text arrangement and size.
7. In your custom shape tools palette, select the copyright symbol.
8. "Draw" the shape wherever you want it to show up on your photos.  You can either put it in the middle or record different actions for horizontal and vertical photos.  If you put it in the corner on a horizontal photo, it may be cropped when you apply the action on a vertical photo.  Hold down the shift key as you make the shape to keep everything proportionate.  
9. When you have everything how you want it, stop recording by clicking the square next to the record button.
10. When you open up other photos that you want to watermark, you should just be able to open your actions window, select the action you want, and hit the play action button. 

*If you have photos cropped to different sizes, it would be a good idea to include resizing to a similar size as part of your action to avoid the watermark being cropped, depending on the desired placement of your watermark.

This bulletin board will look soooo much better after I find time to paint the frame!

Actions are something that I don't utilize as much as I should.  If there are things you do over and over again in Photoshop, consider using actions as a time saver.  Hopefully this was helpful!

Southern Africa

Every year the high school in my district has "Cultural Heritage Week".  This year they chose Southern Africa as the focus.  Each of the elementary Art teachers is supposed to teach a 6th grade lesson based on Southern Africa.  I have been using Pinterest to collect images for my research.  (You can see my Southern African Art board here.)  Anyway, I was just sitting here thinking about how cool it would be if we could somehow connect with students actually living in Southern Africa.  Wouldn't that make it so much more meaningful for the students?  I would love to do some sort of Art swap or even just send a letter and some artwork to give a school there.  The problem is, I'm not sure how to go about doing this.  So I am reaching out to the wonderful community we have here, in the hopes that someone might either BE in Southern Africa, KNOW someone in Southern Africa, or know HOW to go about making connections!  I don't know where to start!

In case you don't know (I had to look it up since geography is not my strong suit,) the five countries that make up Southern Africa are:

•  Botswana
•  Lesotho
•  Namibia
•  South Africa
•  Swaziland

Any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated.  If you have ideas for me, you can comment here or email me at catharine.morris@yahoo.com.

*So far, I just searched for schools in South Africa (using this website http://www.schoolguide.co.za/directory/search-results_m213/query:all/cat:6/order:featured/) and started emailing but I don't know if this is the best route to take!