All of us know that the best way to protect your digital photos on the Internet is by watermarking them, but sometimes to place the watermark on the photos is not enough to secure your photos. For example, look at these pictures.
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| Original photo with a small watermark in the center |
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| We removed the watermark but added significant watermark footprint |
We removed the watermark using photo editing software. Remaining defects on the restored picture are so invisible that the photo can be easily stolen.
Does it mean that watermarks in general are insecure? No. Watermarks are secure if you use them properly. Look at the next pictures to understand how you can improve the watermark.
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| Original photo with a small watermark in the upper-right corner |
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| We removed the watermark with no artifacts |
What is the difference between the pictures above?
First of all, we placed the new watermark in the centre of the photo. Watermark position is a crucial factor that can make your watermark exceptionally strong or useless.
For clarity, we split the image that you want to protect into three areas. Placing the watermark in these areas will guarantee you a different degree of protection.
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Worst protection |  |
Better protection |  |
Best protection |
Placing the watermark in the corner of the picture makes your protection as weak as possible. The worst decision in this case is to reduce the watermark size. However, such watermark (especially, small watermark) affects the overall picture expression as little as possible.
The yellow area is an excellent place for your watermark because it doesn’t allow an easy crop to remove the watermark. It can still be removed using a pixel-by-pixel retouching, but that is a hard task by itself.
The center of the picture is the best place to put your watermark. This is the most detailed part of the picture. So this way of watermarking makes the protection stronger. In addition, your watermark is particularly noticeable.
If your watermark seems to irritate the viewers (too noticeable), just make it translucent.
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| Opaque watermark (no transparency) | Translucent watermark (70% transparency) |
The second distinction is photo coverage. The watermark is large enough to protect most of the picture’s details. As the result, this watermark can’t be removed without remarkable effects to the image. A good-sized watermark should cover at least approximately 30% of the photo.
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| Protected photo with bigger watermark |
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| Noticeable artifacts after watermark removal |
To restore this picture we have used the same technique as before. You see there are lots of defects on the picture so that we are not able to use it unauthorized way. Combining these two approaches above, you can considerably improve watermark security.
Thank you very much! I’m just starting with watermarking.
Heyy, that program is awesome BUT you should add bulk rename option as well..
Your example of removing a watermark from the center of a photo is ridiculous. Any reasonably talented person, using a clone tool, could perfectly edit out that watermark much better than your example.
What I am hoping for it is ability to display a small watermark (automatically sized) *AND* inside the EXIF data *AND* insert an invisible watermark on photo. Can this application do that?
Besides never releasing the original RAWs, that is truly how one protects their photos.
Visual Watermark can do two first things only – it cannot place invisible watermarks. However, the latter doesn’t offer any kind of protection since it implies you will have to legally persecute unauthorized use. This may be possible if the copycat is in the US, but it’s ABSOLUTELY impossible if he published photos on a, say, chineese or russian website. There is no legal mechanism we could use to remove photos from a website hosted in China/Russia or India. They may even work in US but since they are from China or Russia, we cannot force them down and get a contribution from them.
You’re correct, it is impossible to get a 100% from visible watermarking too. However 99% of web users will produce result far worse than we shown in this post. Using visible watermarking we can protect our photos from the 99 out of 100 copycats on the net.