What you will create in this tutorial is a small application (otherwise called ‘droplet’) with Photoshop’s powerful automation features. Once you save the droplet, you will be able to apply watermarks to any number of images by simply selecting them and dragging them onto the droplet icon. Your source images maybe of different sizes, but the watermark will always be applied to the exact position you specify. Here is how you do it…
First up, we will create the water-mark. Create a new document in Photoshop with following settings:
Choose the foreground colour as black and using the Paint Bucket Tool, fill the background with black. There is a reason why we want the background to be black. (It is because we need to create our watermark in white in order to make them behave correctly when we apply the exclusion blending mode later on.) Grab the Horizontal Type tool and with the foreground colour as white, type the text you want to use for the watermark.
Turn off the visibility of your background layer in the layer palette so that only your watermark is visible on the canvas.
Now let’s save the watermark. Choose File>Save As… from the menu and save it as ‘watermark.png’. (As you are selecting the .png option from the file type drop down, when you click on the save button a pop up will ask whether to save as interlaced or non interlaced. Choose ‘None’ and click OK.
Now we move onto Imageready for creating the droplet. Open up Imageready ( You should find the shortcut icon next to your Photoshop shortcut icon on the start menu if you are wondering where to find it!) and see if you can locate the action palette. If you can’t, don’t worry, press F9 and Imageready will open it up for you. Now click on the small arrow on the top right corner of the palette and select ‘New Action’
In the dialog box that opens up, type in a name for your action, say ‘watermark’ and click ‘Record’.
Well, though we pressed ‘Record’ there are a few things that we need to take care of before we seriously begin recording, so for now we will click the stop button on the layer palette.
Now with the watermark action selected, click on the small arrow on the right corner again and choose ‘Batch Options’.
Choose the following settings:
Now we will begin recording again, so click on the small record button on the layer palette while keeping the watermark layer selected. Now open up an image (open any image, this is just to create the action). Now click File> Place and choose the following settings:
Now the watermark is added at the top right corner of the image. 
Change the blending mode of this layer to ‘Exclusion’. This is to make the layer visible on black as well as white backgrounds.
Now click the stop recording button on the layer palette.
Choose Window>Optimize to open the Optimize palette and choose the following settings:
We will now need to associate the action with these jpg settings. For that, with the action selected, click on the arrow button and select ‘Insert Set Optimization Settings to JPEG’.
Now we are ready to create the droplet. For that, right click on the action ‘watermark’ and choose ‘Create Droplet’. Save the droplet as an .exe in a location of your choice. You can now drag and drop images to this exe for getting them watermarked.
You will find that the watermark created will adjust itself to be visible in black as well as white backgrounds. In about 95% of your images this would work out perfect. The only situation which you need to watch out for is when your background is around about halfway between white and black (i.e around RGB values 128,128,128 or #808080) because at these values, the exclusion blending mode will set our watermark to have the same colour as the background. A solution for this, would be to create a separate droplet (that uses a normal blending mode instead of exclusion), as explained above, exclusively for watermarking such images.
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