Disclaimer

Below given instructions are what I used to copyright my images on my Apple MacBook Pro running OS X v10.5.x 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.

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. There are many software and multiple ways to get this done. Although I don’t use this method all the frequently, I have tested it on CS2 and CS3 editions of Adobe Photoshop and you might find it useful. In one of my previous posts, I had discussed this process and what follows here is a series of steps to use another (smaller) image instead of text to copyright (or just overlay) the main image.

Get The Images Ready

Backup the original picture(s). Using Photoshop (or otherwise), resize your original picture to a reasonable size. 800×600 px is the approximate 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 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.

File → Open and select the image which will be used instead of (or in addition to) the copyright note.

Click on the small image and press the following key combination: cmd + A followed by cmd + C (ctrl + A followed by ctrl + C in Windows).

Click on the larger image (image to be copyrighted) and press the following key combination: cmd + V (ctrl + V in Windows).

Once the smaller image appears as on overlay on top of the larger image, smaller image needs to be properly aligned. To keep track, one may rename the layer that contains smaller image.

After the last four steps (assuming that you picked Bottom & Right Edges), the result should look something as follows. As one can note, the overlayed image is too close to the edges. To make it easily readable, select the Move tool and nudge the small image layer - both in upward and left directions - by a few keystrokes 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, resized images.
Pictures/Processing/Copyrighted: will contain copyrighted images.

Pick the appropriate Quality. To add smaller image on all the resized images, check Run Action under Preferences and select Copyright_Images. Press Run and wait for the process to complete.

As one particular location of smaller image 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. It is quite important to retain the location of smaller image - otherwise the process might complain about not being able to find it.

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