Watermark your photos

Text or logo?

Text is the quick way: your name, your studio or your web address, in any font installed on your PC, at any weight and color. Under Effects in the Properties panel, an Outline, a Shadow or a Glow keeps it readable on light and dark parts alike.

A logo looks more professional and is the same on every photo. A PNG with a clear background sits best. A JPG logo brings its white rectangle with it; for a dark logo, set its layer's blend mode to Multiply in the Layers panel and the white disappears into the photo. Placed pictures larger than the photo are scaled to fit, and keep their full pixels if you size them up again.

The two work together, for example a small logo in a corner with your web address under it. More on styling words: add text to an image.

A dark logo vanishes on a dark photo, and a white one on snow. Keep a light and a dark version of your logo as PNG files, and pick whichever stands out on each picture.

Where to put it, and how strong

A watermark balances protecting the photo against spoiling it:

• In a corner, small and faint: polite credit for portfolios and social posts. Easy to crop off, though.
• Across the subject, large and very see-through: harder to remove, for proofs you send to clients before they pay. Ctrl T, then drag outside a corner, sets it at an angle.
• Over a detailed area such as leaves, fabric or water, where painting it out would be hard work.

As you drag, the mark's edges and middle snap to the photo's edges and center, which makes a centered or corner mark easy to place; hold Ctrl to drag freely. As a starting point, try an opacity between 30 and 60%: the mark stays visible, and the photo still shows through it. The Overlay and Soft Light blend modes make a white or gray mark take on the photo's own tones, for a subtler look.

One photo at a time, and repeating it

Octoolo marks one photo at a time: it does not stamp a whole folder at once. Putting the same mark on the next photo is quick, though. Select the mark's layer and press Ctrl C, open the next photo, and press Ctrl Shift V to paste it in the same place. It arrives as a picture, ready to move or fade.

For a pattern across the whole photo, press Ctrl J to copy the mark as often as you like and drag each copy into place, then select them all and press Ctrl G to group them, so one opacity setting fades the lot.

For PDF documents, where a watermark goes on every page, see watermark PDF instead.

Keep the clean original

Octoolo never writes over the file you opened: Export asks where the marked copy goes. Keep the unmarked original for prints and paying clients, and share only the marked copy. File › Save keeps the photo and the mark as separate layers in an Octoolo project, so you can move the mark later. The marked copy also leaves out the location and camera details the original holds, which is worth having on photos you post publicly.

No watermark is a lock. A faint mark in a corner can be cropped away, and a determined person can paint out most marks. A watermark makes copying less tempting and gets your name seen, and the clean, full-size original you kept helps show that a picture is yours if a copy turns up elsewhere. For extra protection, share smaller copies too: 1080 or 1280 pixels wide is plenty for screens and of little use for a print. Export's Size list does that in the same step.