Add a Watermark

Be honest about what it prevents

A watermark does not stop theft. Anyone determined can crop it, clone it out, or run an inpainting model over it in seconds, and the tools to do that are as free as this one.

What a watermark actually does is raise the effort above casual, and attach attribution to an image that travels. Someone who would have right-clicked and reposted may not bother; someone who reposts anyway carries your name with them. Those are real benefits, and they are the honest reason to do it.

Placement and the trade-off

There is a straight trade between removability and intrusiveness, and where you sit on it depends on what the image is for:

• A corner mark is unobtrusive and trivially cropped out — fine for attribution on work you are happy to have shared.
• A mark across the subject is much harder to remove and much more damaging to the image — right for proofs and previews clients have not paid for.
• A large, low-opacity tiled pattern is the hardest to remove cleanly, and the standard for stock previews.
• A semi-transparent mark over a busy area survives inpainting better than one over flat colour, where a model can simply reconstruct the background.

Opacity and contrast

Around 30–50% opacity is the usual working range: visible enough to read, faint enough not to ruin the image. Below about 20% it disappears against busy areas; above 70% it dominates.

Pure white or pure black marks vanish against matching areas of the photo. A mark with a subtle outline or drop shadow stays legible over both light and dark regions, which matters because you rarely control where in the frame it lands across a batch.

Keep the original clean

Watermark on export, never on your master. Once a mark is burned into the pixels it cannot be cleanly removed, and the version you will want in two years — for a portfolio, a print, a client who did pay — is the clean one.

For batch work, that means keeping an unwatermarked archive and generating marked copies as needed. It is also worth keeping metadata authorship fields on the original: unlike a visible mark, they cost nothing and survive as long as nobody strips them.