As mentioned in the previous write up along similar lines, most of us take photographs and many of us post them in this vast, nearly infinite internet. Inherent to this process is a desire to put our name on the pictures - either to protect them from plagiarism or to feed our ego or whatever other reason. It would only be nicer if the copyright note is outside the main picture - so that the picture can be seen in its full glory. Added advantage of such an approach - if possible - would be that the picture will look framed/matted, often enhancing the image itself. There are many software and multiple ways to get this done. Following is a method I commonly use - at least to frame and copyright most images in my showcase - and have tested it on CS3 edition of Adobe Photoshop. Unlike many Actions/Scripts available on the internet, this procedure provides matte/frame of equal width on three of the four sides (top, left, right) and a bit more on the other side (bottom), to make space for copyright note.

Disclaimer

Below given instructions are what I used to copyright my images on my Apple PowerBook G4 running OS X v10.4.10 and these may very well work for you. However, please note that you are using these instructions at your very own risk and this website, sgowtham.net, is not responsible for any/all damage caused to your property, intellectual or otherwise.

Get The Images Ready

Backup the original picture(s). Using Photoshop (or otherwise), resize your original picture to a reasonable size. 720×540 px is the dimension of my resized picture.

Start The Process

Open the resized image in Photoshop and the screen should look something like:

We could continue this process assuming that there is only one picture to frame/copyright but it is seldom the case. Let us assume that there is a folder full of images that need similar work and since doing all these steps one at a time for each picture can be laborious task, let us take the Photoshop Action approach. To this effect, pick a New Action from the Actions palette and give it a suitable name:

Click on Record and You should see the Red circular button in the Actions palette, indicating the recording is ON.

Select Layer ⇒ New ⇒ Layer From Background. Give the background layer a name (I call it MainPicture).

Select Layer ⇒ New Fill Layer ⇒ Solid Color. Give the fill layer a name (I call it BlackBackground) and pick a color of your choice from the subsequent dialog box.

The result should look something like below.

Now, just swap the MainPicture and BlackBackground layers in Layers palette (this can be dragging BlackBackground layer to be below MainPicture). The result should look something like below:

Now, it’s time to add the matte/frame. Select Image ⇒ Canvas Size.

I chose 20 pixels for Width, 60 pixels for Height with With Relative checked and with center Anchor. The result should look like below - the main picture middle-centered in the resized canvas.

Select the Move Tool (M), select the MainPicture layer in Layers palette and nudge it up by 20 keystrokes. This should result in the top, left and right margins/frames to be 20px in width, and bottom one to be 40px.

Select the Text Tool (T) and type in the copyright note anywhere on the bottom frame of canvas. To get the © symbol in Mac, use Option+g key combination. Pick any font of your choice and add additional effects to your heart’s content.

With the copyright/text layer still hightlighted, do the following:

You can select Left Edges if you wish

After the above steps (assuming that you picked Right Edges), the result should look something like:

As one can note, the copyright notice is too close to the edges. To make it easily readable, nudge the copyright/text layer - both in upward (12 keystrokes) and left (10 keystrokes) directions using the arrow keys.

Once that’s done, press the Blue square button in the Actions palette to STOP recording.

That’s it. Now this sequence of steps can be called as and when needed and the best part is that it can be used with other built-in features of Photoshop to work on folder full of images. Let us assume the following directory structure:

Pictures/Processing/Originals: contains a copy of the original images.
Pictures/Processing/Resized: will contain resized images.
Pictures/Processing/Copyrighted: will contain copyrighted images.

First, the original images need to be resized. Photoshop provides a built-in feature to accomplish this task.

Pick the appropriate Resize to fit & Quality values and press Run. Once the process is complete, one can find the resized images in JPEG folder under Pictures/Processing/Resized. To add copyright note on all the resized images, start the Image Processor, select appropriate folders (for source and destination), add other File Types if necessary, check the Run Action under Preferences and select MyFramedCopyright from Default Actions set. Press Run and wait for the process to complete.

As one particular location of copyright note may not serve well for all images, it may be useful to create more Photoshop Actions - TopLeft, TopRight, BottomLeft and BottomRight - so on and use them as appropriate.

Comments and/or suggestions, technical or otherwise, about this would be appreciated by myself as well as fellow readers.