# Using actions for watermarking - how about relative sizes?



## creisinger (May 17, 2010)

Given the fact, that here and there I have to crop images which leaves them nowhere near the "regular" resolution of the camera but I still would like to have an action in Photoshop to slap in my custom watermark.

Now here is my scenario:

I just don't want to put my watermark in the center of my image. 

I want to enlarge my canvas size 3 times with different border colors, also applying other filters while doing so. I got that to work to a certain extent but ran into a big issue:

Once I'm ready to add my name and URL at the bottom of the image, dead center, Photoshop always refers to the font size selected at the time the action was created. Can't blame Photoshop for that but I'm wondering how I could create fonts in actions that are relatively sized to the resolution of the image.

I can easily "expand" my canvas with relative values when I go backwards, meaning that I use the full res image and make it smaller from that point on (adding frames etc. - I know, sounds stupid to lose resolution but it's not that much and basically only for web preview...). Here I can use % numbers which works fine but not with the font or even my logo as a bitmap. The logo will be used "as is".

This is especially frustrating when working with all kinds of aspect ratios at the same time: landscape, portrait and square or even panoramic.

Does anyone know a tutorial how to work out those kinks?

Thanks in advance.


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## MountainPaul (May 20, 2010)

You would need to use scripting and text is not that easy to work with.
Getting the bounds of a text item you can get the height and width then you can reduce or increase the font size as required or you could make the font very large, raster it and resize to the required size. Neither way is simple and requires an intermediate knowledge of the scripting language to be used.
On a PC
VB, C# or JavaScript
On a Mac
AppleScript or JavaScript


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## creisinger (May 20, 2010)

Thanks for your input. I once learned C++ but since I never apply it pretty much don't remember anything nor do I know how to apply that in Photoshop.

I guess I have to create individual actions for the various aspect ratios and hope for the best.


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