All right smart people, help me out.

What'* the easiest way to turn a normal picture into a watermark type picture in either Photoshop CS or Elements (I got both, can use niether).

My daughter showed me to set up the paintbrush as White and just "paint" the whole image, but there'* got to be a better way......

go to your image brightness/contrast control. Bump up brightness to the right, contrast to the left

layers palette...

double click the background layer to make it a layer 0

then drag the opacity slider to where u want it, and then save

I'm no guru and get frustrated with pshop but what about some effect plug in'*?
I have a whole bunch of effects for pshop that do some pretty crazy stuff.