Friday, March 27, 2015

Blogging Tips: How to Use PicMonkey for Drop Shadow Texts and Watermarks

So if you haven't heard of PicMonkey you are really missing out. I, like many others, don't want to splurge on photoshop. I primarily don't want to because I'm not that tech savvy or want to spend the money on it at this time. So I frequently use PicMonkey which is the best free alternative. There is also iPiccy and others but this is my favorite. Today I'll show you a couple tricks that I have up my sleeve with PicMonkey.

Alanna & Company: How to Make Drop Shadow Text and Watermarks in PicMonkey

Drop Shadow Text 

Drop shadow are nice on text because it really gets them to "pop". I use this drop shadow and overlay trick for my watermark I put on my pictures. 

1. Click on create and type in any number. I used 800x800. You are always able to crop and resize later.

Alanna & Company: How to Make Drop Shadow Text and Watermarks in PicMonkey


2. Here's where you can choose your canvas color. You can choose transparent which is really convenient for things like favicons, but I also used it to edit my header text so my pink background shows through behind my header image which is only text with a transparent background. Anyways, for this I will choose a bright pink background so it will be easier to see the drop shadow.

Alanna & Company: How to Make Drop Shadow Text and Watermarks in PicMonkey

3. Go to text on the left hand side and choose your text. I will choose a nice big bold text for this. The bolder the better. Go ahead and type what you want to type. For this I typed "Drop Shadow Overlay" but I will show you later how you can use this for a watermark. 

Alanna & Company: How to Make Drop Shadow Text and Watermarks in PicMonkey

4. Now you will right click on your text that you just created. A drop down will appear and you will click on duplicate text. 

Alanna & Company: How to Make Drop Shadow Text and Watermarks in PicMonkey

5. Now change the color of the duplicated text to something that strongly contrasts. I typically do black and then white. Then you can drag the duplicated text so that it overlays nicely. You can also use the "up", "down", "left" and "right" arrow keys on your keyboard to make minute changes. Another option is you can always make the duplicated text slightly larger so the drop shadow is bigger than the top layer of text. and viola! You have your dropshadowed text. 

Alanna & Company: How to Make Drop Shadow Text and Watermarks in PicMonkey

Making Your Own Watermark

1. All right, let's go back a couple steps. Go back to the first tab, and change your canvas color to transparent. When it's transparent it should look like this.

Alanna & Company: How to Make Drop Shadow Text and Watermarks in PicMonkey

2. Now let's crop so we just get the text. Just drag and drop the box to outline your text. After it's cropped, go ahead and save in a place where you can remember.

Alanna & Company: How to Make Drop Shadow Text and Watermarks in PicMonkey

3. Now find a picture where you want to put your watermark on. Click open on the top navigation bar and select that photo. Now navigate to the overlay tab on the left navigation. It looks like a butterfly.

Alanna & Company: How to Make Drop Shadow Text and Watermarks in PicMonkey

4. Click on "Your Own" at the top and select your saved overlay image. Now you can put that overlay on every picture to keep your branding the same. If you're feeling fancy you can try the different blend modes to make sure your overlay really pops but as long as you're using the drop shadow text you created there usually isn't any need.

Alanna & Company: How to Make Drop Shadow Text and Watermarks in PicMonkey

Here's my final product. I have the drop shadow overlay sample, I have my own watermark, and just some regular text describing what my post will be about!

Alanna & Company: How to Make Drop Shadow Text and Watermarks in PicMonkey


Hope this is helpful! If you have any questions or want more tutorials about PicMonkey let me know! Hopefully I can help out.

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