Help! Watermark needed for wedding stationary

[Paddy]

Andrea and I are in the middle of designing weding stationary. We have finalised everything, except that we would like a monotone watermark of the building in the inlay of the card. Now Andrea's grandmother has decided to create one, however erm.. her eyesight isn't quite what it was..... Unfortunatley, i cant seem to get it right either....

Anyway, I have to come up with one fast, or we'll have to use the one that she produces....

I have been told that pencil drawings make the best watermark, but I am about as artistic as a blind eskimo painting with a frozen salmon...

I have uploaded some pictures, all of which are not terribly good... but it was the best i could do.

Can anyone help or offer suggestions????

[VJ]

There are filters in Photoshop (crayon, graphic pen, ...) that turn an photo into a very artistic image (almost drawn)...


Jörg

[Paddy]

It must be the way i have taken the photo, but the building always looks ... out of focus.... as it is in the original... I want to keep as much of the detail of the building as possible....

Using the photoshop filters, i can make the foreground look great.

I just cant seem to get it right.

I think the top photo would make the best watermark though.... What do you think?

[VJ]

Yes, I like the top one best of all...

Here is a good utility to convert to b&w:

http://www.digidaan.nl/

(somewhere on the left is a box "channelmixtures")

I personally don't have that much experience with converting to artistic-like graphics, but perhaps first going to b&w might help...?


Jörg

[VJ]

There either is a new version (with the explanation), or the older one (link at the bottom)...


Jörg

[Paddy]

here's Tony's effort

https://www.le.ac.uk/pc/asa8/PICT0026eq.jpg

https://www.le.ac.uk/pc/asa8/PICT0026.jpg

Andrea doens't like the way that the second one is so.... uniform....

personally i quite like it!

[VJ]

I also like the second one.

Euhm, will the watermark be printed in colour or in b&w ? Bear in mind that it is a watermark, so text coming over it will have to be readable...



Jörg

[Maggi]

I made a version for you, but the pic is too big to get attached here, so I'd need either your e-Mail or a web place where I can upload it to ...



I attached a scaled down version though, please let me know what you think about it

[Paddy]

Cheers magi, I think its fab.
Can you mail it to spam@bushe.co.uk??

i think the email limit there is 5MB . Let me now if you need more space.

[mutz]

Here's an attempt.

[az]

I really like Maggi's, but in order to use it as a watermark, you'll have to reduce contrast a little and turn up brightness, or the text won't be very readable.

One good trick to make text more readable is to give it a small white soft drop shadow with an offset of 0 pixels. This will create some kind of haze behind the letters that's almost unnoticable, but increases readability a lot. You'll see this a lot in the media, if you know what you're looking for, but you won't notice it if you don't know it's there.

AZ

[az]

Here's an (a little exaggerated) example:

AZ

[Paddy]

Cheers for this Mutz... i think its great

[mutz]

Aahh shucks...c'mon..

[Pace]