Mobile Photography Weekly

- [Sean] Hi, I'm Sean Duggan. And this week on Mobile Photography Weekly, I'll show you how you can make a custom watermark from your signature and easily apply it to a photo in Snapseed. There are a lot of different apps that let you watermark your photos, but the great thing about Snapseed is that it's free, it's available for both Android and iOS, and a lot of people already have it on their phones. Let's get started. The first step is to sign your name or make your mark, if it's something other than your name, using dark ink on a piece of white paper. And don't make it too large because if you want it to be smaller when placed on a photo, you want to have it somewhat small itself and surrounded by a lot of empty white space. And you can see here how my name compares to the size of the pen that I use, so it's not very large at all. Next, take a photo of this. Now, I just used my iPhone to do this. And I made sure that it was surrounded by a lot of empty white space. And again, that's just so that I can size it small enough once I get into Snapseed. Alright, next we need to prepare the signature. So what I'm going to do is, I'm going to come out and open up Snapseed, and let's go and open that file up. And I'm going to tap on Tools, and then Tune Image. So the main objective here is to make the image brighter and more contrast-y. So I want that paper to look more white and not this kind of dingy yellow-y brown that it is now. So I'll swipe vertically on the screen to get my controls there, and I'll choose Brightness and then I will drag to the right to brighten this up. Something like that looks pretty good. Let me come and choose Shadows, I'm going to make my shadows darker, so I'll drag that to the left. And then I'll make the highlights even brighter. So the objective is to get the paper looking as white as possible, and the signature being nice and dark. And one final thing I'm going to do here is lower the saturation all the way down, just in case there was any trace of color cast there from the light that I used to photograph this in. Alright, that looks pretty good, I'm just going to brighten this up a little bit more and tap the check mark to apply that. Now, if what you want to have is a dark signature to place on top of photos, so maybe for a photo that had a lot of light tones in it and you want a dark signature, then you're pretty much done. So tap Export and let's save a copy of that. But if you want to have a light signature to place over a dark photo, we need to do one other step. So next what I'm going to do is tap on Tools, I'll come and choose Curves. And what I'm going to do is invert this curve, I'm just going to drag the points of this curve and just reverse them so they're going in the opposite direction. And there you can see, if I tap the check mark, that now I have a white signature on black. I'll tap Export to save that. And now, let me come and choose to open up another image. And what I'm going to do is go and get an image that I want to add my watermark to, I'll choose this shot of Montreal. And next what I'm going to do is tap on Tools. And down in the last row of the tools in Snapseed, there's an option for double exposure, I'll choose that. Here in the Double Exposure tool I'll tap on the Plus Image tool. And I will come out to my recents, and I'll get one of those files that has the name in white on a black background, and you can see, it's already doing what it needs to do there. And the reason it is doing this so nicely is because the last time I used this tool, I used the lighten blend mode. So if you tap on this little swatch book here, you can see you have different blend modes. If you wanted to blend in your dark signature onto an image, you would choose the darken blend mode. But for our purposes we need to use the lighten blend mode. And now I'm just going to use a two finger gesture to scale this smaller. And we'll put this down here in the corner. And that looks pretty good, just like that. We'll tap the check mark to apply that. And you can see that that looks very nice. This watermark technique in Snapseed is really easy to do. And once you have the two versions of the watermark image set up, it's really quick to apply using the double exposure tool. It's not a solution for batch applying a watermark to several images at a time, but for quickly adding your mark to images that you want to post on social media, it's a pretty easy way to do this very common task.