What a watermark is actually for
It helps to be clear about this, because the common expectation and the reality are some distance apart. A watermark does not prevent your work being copied. Anything visible on a screen can be captured, and marks can be cropped, cloned out, or reduced by software specifically built for the purpose.
What a watermark does well is make provenance obvious and casual reuse inconvenient. Someone who would have saved your image and reposted it without a thought now has to deliberately remove your name first — which turns an absent-minded act into a conscious one, and leaves them without a defence if it comes up later. For proofs sent to clients, it also makes it obvious which version is the unpaid one.
Corner marks and tiling
A corner mark sits in the margin of the frame, small and semi-transparent. It stays out of the way of the picture, which makes it the right choice for finished work you are happy to see shared as long as your name goes with it. Its weakness is equally obvious: a single crop removes it.
Tiling repeats the mark across the entire image at an angle. Because it crosses the subject rather than sitting in empty space, there is no crop that removes it and no clean background to reconstruct. It is genuinely harder to defeat — and it is visibly in the way, which is why it belongs on proofs and previews rather than on work you are presenting.
Sizing that works on every image
The size control is a percentage of the image's shorter side rather than a font size in pixels, and that choice matters more than it might appear.
A 24-pixel caption is a prominent band across a 600-pixel thumbnail and an illegible speck on a 6000-pixel camera original. Since you are picking the setting by eye on a scaled-down view either way, a fixed pixel size would mean a mark that looked right in the tool and wrong in the export. Sizing relatively means what you set is what you get, whatever the source resolution — and the same settings work across a batch of mixed sizes.
Keeping the text readable
Watermarks have to sit on top of photographs, and photographs contain every brightness at once. White text vanishes against a sky; black text vanishes in shadow. There is no colour that contrasts with the whole frame.
The mark is drawn with a subtle dark stroke around the glyphs as well as a fill. On a bright area the fill carries it; on a dark area the stroke gives the letters an edge. The result stays readable across the whole image without you having to hunt for a colour that happens to work.
Common uses
- Adding a copyright line to photographs before publishing them
- Marking client proofs so the unpaid version is unmistakable
- Branding product images for a shop or marketplace listing
- Stamping “DRAFT” or “SAMPLE” across a preview
- Attributing images shared on social media