How to watermark your photos

A watermark does one of two jobs: it says who made this, or it makes a picture hard to reuse. Those call for quite different marks, so decide which you need first.

For credit: a small corner mark

If you're sharing your work and just want your name on it, keep it small and quiet.

• Size: about 3 to 5 percent of the image width.
• Position: a bottom corner, with a little margin.
• Opacity: 50 to 70 percent, with a soft shadow so it reads on light and dark areas.

Sizes here are percentages of each image, so the same design looks right across a batch of mixed sizes.

For protection: a tiled mark

If you're sending proofs to a client or showing work before payment, a corner mark won't do, because anyone can crop it. Repeat the mark across the whole image instead, at a low opacity and an angle.

Short text works best. Try your name, or the word "Proof".

Text or logo?

Text is simple and always sharp. A logo looks more polished, but needs a transparent background, so use a PNG, WebP or SVG rather than a JPG with a white box around it.

Three common mistakes

1. Too big. A mark that fights the picture makes the work look worse, which defeats the point.
2. One colour on everything. White disappears on a bright sky. A shadow fixes this without choosing a colour for each photo.
3. Watermarking your only copy. Always keep the original, because a watermark can't be cleanly taken out afterwards.

What a watermark can't do

No mark is proof against someone determined to remove it. Sharing a smaller version helps too, because there's less for anyone to reuse. You can resize your images before you watermark them.