Today’s blog post is a walk through of how I create a watermark on the photos which I post online, using a software named Canva. This ‘walk through’ came about at the reguest of a guild that I was doing a program for. Although the conversation centered around placing watermarks on photos taken of your creative work - whether it’s a quilt, a painting, or a photograph - the technique is the same. I used this photo - which I took on the coast of Maine early one morning - as the sample photo.

The website can be found at www.canva.com. There are paid as well as free options with their accounts. You do not need to have a paid account to place a watermark on a photo.  If you are using a free account, your dashboards may look slightly different than the screen shots I’ve posted here.

Once you’re on the Canva site, you want to select Create A Design, and upload the image you want to work on. Images can be uploaded in several formats, this one is a .jpg file. Then select edit the image., which will bring you to this screen…

Hi, I’m Linda Pearl - quilter, teacher, designer and blogger, and I’m happy to have you here. I’d like to tell you a little bit more About Me…

This is what your screen should look like. Select Text on the left hand sidebar. You can select the size of the text you want to use in your watermark here – either as a heading, a subheading or body text.  (read that as large, medium or small).

 Click on Subheading, then you’ll see a small text box pop up in the middle of the image.

Begin typing the text you want to use in the watermark. In this case, I’m going with a simple @OneQuiltingCircle.com, which is the name of my website

There’s a  toolbar directly above the image (see where it says Open Sans?).  You can control the font, the font size and the color of the text there.  The color is the Rainbow A color – click on that, and it will bring up a menu option of colors. You can pick one or if you have a specific color # you want to use, you can input it there and the watermark will work for that. 

Placement…this is critically important, especially when you showcase your quilting work.  If you put it in a more central location, it’s harder for hackers to crop it out and leave the picture integrity in tact.   In this case, I’m going to use this as the background for text, so I’ll put the watermark in the bottom left hand corner.  The black default color doesn’t really show up against the background, so I am changing it to match my web site colors.

Once the image is the way you want it, click on the download button to save it to your computer (or a cloud folder…you decide).  I always name my images with ‘WM’ in the title – it helps me to see right away that the image has already been watermarked.

Do you have questions about adding a watermark? Please leave a question or comment below…