Many photographers struggle with the decision whether or not to add a watermark to their photos, balancing the elegance of a photograph against a desire for accreditation, sometimes even compensation, for their creative works, works that are so frequently stolen shared without permission by the online community.

For my own purposes, I choose not to watermark the photographs that I post on Flickr, Facebook, or other sources. Through these media, I choose to share my work freely, opting out of any sort of inbuilt accreditation. However, on this site, where my images are more likely to be found out of context, I choose to add a subtle indication of their source.

I find the watermark above to be readable and yet still subtle on practically any image, working well, without alteration, on solid and mixed-colour backgrounds, remaining legible overtop all but the most intricate detail. Feel free to drag that image about your window or download it and experiment with it yourself. I’ll describe exactly how to create it after the philosophizing below.

What is a Watermark?

Some photographers, feeling the need to protect their work so jealously, create a visual paywall behind which the quality of the photograph is merely alluded to, a barrier so severe as to move beyond a watermark, instead becoming a photographic moat surrounding and isolating their artistic treasures.

However, with the ability to remove these marks seemingly outpacing even the wildest imaginations of would-be counterfeiters, such attempts to secure photos via watermarking are usually futile, often resulting in the mutilation of the image by the artist, the destruction of any value worth protecting, the end result no longer a watermarked photo, instead merely an advertisement for the photo itself.

Obtrusive and obstructive graphics can have a certain protective value when marketing a photograph, but not when presenting a photograph, and such devices should not really be called watermarks.

A true watermark, owing from the word’s origin, a water stain visible only when paper is held to a light, should be subtle, almost invisible. And while several options for invisible watermarking exist, these options forfeit apparent accreditation for the work.

Instead, a modern digital watermark, best suited for works that can so readily be reproduced without context, should be subtle, elegant, and unobtrusive, their purpose, not to secure an image, but to give credit to its creator, ideally a mark that is only seen when it is sought out.

How to Watermark a Photograph Cleanly and Effectively

In this section I’ll explain the method I use, which serves well, without modification, over practically any image. I’ll describe the steps required using Photoshop (and will assume some familiarity), but if you use a different tool, you should be able to adapt the principles easily.

The key to a simple, clean, and flexible watermark is actually fairly basic. Your watermark should be white, with a dark drop-shadow. This can serve to be a bit ostentatious, but making the whole thing transparent can work wonders for helping it blend into your photograph, to make it as invisible as possible, while retaining near-universal legibility.

Step 1: Choose an All-White Graphic at 35% Opacity
Whether text or a logo, create your watermark on a new layer. Have its fill be all-white at 35% fill opacity. This causes a slight lightening of the base colour (coupled with the overall transparency from Step 3), which works quite well on just about any background, even mixed. I’ve found that it’s not quite light enough on absolutely black backgrounds (though on very dark it’s perfect), so if I need to use it on pure RGB(0,0,0) backgrounds, I prefer to bump this up to 45%. This is another reason to keep the Photoshop file as the working copy (see the section below on Applying Your Watermark).

Step 2: Add an Outer Glow with Multiply Blending
With your layer selected, click the “FX” button to add an “Outer Glow” Layer Style. Use the following settings (also see image below):

• Blend Mode: Multiply
• Opacity: 75%
• Colour: Black
• Spread: 25%
• Size: 4px (May need to be 5-6px for images much larger than 1024px)
• Range: 50%

Step 3: Make the Whole Layer 35% Opacity
At this point the watermark will look anything but subtle. The final step is to change the layer opacity (in addition to the fill) to 35%. If you have an especially simple image, you can get away with dropping this down even further, but you risk losing legibility over more complex backgrounds. It may look a little hard to see on the default checkered photoshop background, but if you want, you can add a solid white layer beneath it for visual purposes.

Applying Your Watermark

Now that you’ve created your watermark, you’ll want to start using it on your images. You can save that image (without the background layer, if you added one) as a transparancy-enabled PNG, and then use that in applications that support the automatic adding of watermarks (Aperture, Lightroom, etc), but I’ve found that, depending on the size of the image (and rotation), I want greater flexibility in the sizing and positioning of the watermark.

My preferred method is to save my watermark as a Photoshop document. Then, whenever I need to watermark an image, I open both the desired image and the watermark.psd file in Photoshop. I then duplicate the watermark layer into the destination image. I’ve found that this is the best way to preserve the layer effects and opacity settings. The advantage of duplicating the entire original Photoshop layer into the new image is that I can work at full resolution, which for my text watermark, is unlimited. I can then resize the watermark as desired without introducing undesired scaling artifacts. When I’m satisfied, I save the entire photograph as a flattened JPG or PNG of the appropriate size.

You should certainly feel free to experiment, both with the settings above and with the method of use. Hopefully you’ve found this article useful; my goal has been to empower photographers to create the most subtle, yet still legible watermarks that best suit their images. Drop us a line in the comments below to let us know how it goes or to share your own watermarking tips and tricks.    

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I love Instagram. And yet, I’m not very fond of the style of Instagram photos. I don’t share the vitriolic distaste that some have for the Instagram style; I simply don’t find the look to be to my taste whatsoever. Rather, it’s the appeal, the very phenomenon of its success, and the beautiful way in which it affects the way we view and appreciate digital photos that I find both fascinating and intriguing.

On its surface, Instagram’s obvious appeal is its timely and trendy evocation of things retro. No doubt a large part of its meteoric success has been due to the fact that it not only oozes hipster-chic, the retro cool du jour, but it also makes masterful use of the very best of social media modernity. If there’s one thing hipsters like more than looking cool, it’s being able to look cool in front of their entire social circle.

But Instagram is more than just hipster douchebaggery. It has a more primal draw. Whereas the hyper-concious pursuit of what’s considered capital-C “Cool” is very cerebral, an activity requiring an agonizingly analytical approach by the Painfully Cool, Instagram speaks to us most strongly on a much deeper, more innate level.

Instagram’s deeper and more universal appeal is its ability to evoke nostalgia for the way photography used to make us feel. Through advanced technological fakery, they’ve managed to reproduce some of the magic of those poor-quality, candid Polaroids that simply speak to us in a special way, a way in which the undoctored snaps that come out of our phones and digicams do not.

When you peer deeply into a digital photo, you eventually arrive at the pixel level, a solid barrier beyond which you know, with a certain cold finality, that no more detail is to be found. However with analog media like film (and painting, sculpture, etc), the image is made up of real objects, globules of photosensitive molecules which have infinite fractal complexity.

While the pixelation of the digital medium, like the depressingly honest clap a casino dealer performs at the end of a shift, reveals that nothing more is hidden, analog film has no abrupt transition, instead performing a magician’s sleight of hand, smoothly redirecting attention from the detail of the scene to that of the medium.

A low resolution Polaroid snapshot might capture only a tiny fraction of a scene’s detail compared to a high-resolution digital photo, but that Polaroid has no hard barrier between the truth of what was captured of the scene and the artificial information, the noise inherent in the medium. This gradual blend of detail distinguishes film photography like Polaroids from what we’ve been accustomed to from the digital photography we typically encounter in our travels along the intertubes.

With the infinite detail available in film, we’re free to peer closer into the photo. Our imagination isn’t hamstrung by the reality of detail that is truly and accurately represented, instead it’s free to explore and find its own imagery among the unbound detail of the noise and film grain, as it is when staring into the sky on a cloud-dotted day or a star-filled night.

The magic of Instagram is that it they’ve found a digital formula which approximates that limitless detail of film. In a case of addition via subtraction, they apply scratches, noise, blurring, oversaturation, and overexposure, all of which actually reduce the detail of the scene, but also serve to more skillfully hide that barrier of absolute truth captured of the scene.

True, that cold digital barrier still exists. The sense of the unbound imagination that is present in a Polaroid is only artificially replicated in an Instagram photo. And yet, I find that it doesn’t really lessen the effect. As evidenced by its near-universal appeal, I think the formula that they’ve hit upon truly does have a deeper effect than just its retro photographic style. Perhaps someday a successor to Instagram will come along and find a way to capture that essence of infinite detail, but without the trendiness of the somewhat clichéd style.    

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February 12, 2010. After 2,400 days of buildup, anticipation, fatigue, and anxiety, the Olympics had finally arrived in Vancouver. Yet the sense of reality, the feeling that the wait was actually over, lagged far behind the pace set by the countdown clock. The torch was in Vancouver, but the Games still felt distant.

While I had been looking forward to the Olympics since Vancouver was announced as host, in the last days leading up to the opening ceremonies, a feeling of anxiety had slowly eclipsed my excitement. All I hoped of the games was for Vancouver and Canada to not embarrass ourselves. So far things we’re looking good with the facilities and with the overal ‘Look of the Games’. As yet we had managed to avoid any serious cock-ups.

London 2012 Giant Phallus Monsters

[Julian Finney/Getty Images]

I was up early on this most anticipated of days, watching the torch relay on television. I had planned on heading out to get some photos of the relay, but I knew that the torch was going to criss-cross the city throughout most of the day and I was procrastinating.

When I heard that a very special surprise bearer was going to be receiving the torch and passing two blocks from my home, I anticipated another Matt Lauer or Michael Bublé. My motivation to capture such a moment for posterity did not overcome my considerable morning inertia.

However, when Walter Gretzky stepped out of the torch bearer’s mini-bus and the crowd erupted with cheering, I leapt into my clothes, snatched my camera, and flew out the door.

I arrived at Granville and Smithe and chose my spot. The torch had not yet passed to Mr. Gretzky, so I had a few minutes to take in the scene. The streets were definitely buzzing, but so far the torch escort was a bit of overkill for the amount of crowd-control needed.

The Torch Motorcade

Before long, Walter was passed the flame, and began his walk down Granville Street, escorted by the olympic flame security detail. The relatively sparse crowd was cheering calmly but enthusiastically, a mere golf clap in comparison to what was to come.

Walter Gretzky and the Torch Escort

An unexpected detour down the Granville pedestrian mall took the flame behind the barriers separating the relay route from the spectators. Along with a few dozen others, I spontaneously fell in with Gretzky. Some were following behind, glad be part of an Olympic Torch parade with a Canadian cultural icon as Grand Marshal. Many, like me, were recording the moment, leapfrogging from perch to perch trying to get a good shoot of a memorable moment.

Canada's Greatest Dad

Soon after, the flame had been passed to the next bearer. Gretzky no longer held aloft the Olympic Flame, but he did still hold the attention and adoration of a swarm of enthusiastic fans. Without the score of bodyguards (flameguards?), he quickly found himself in the centre of friendly mob.

He stood amid a forest of arms, the branches host to a flock of twittering and chirping cameras, the cellphones and digi cams flashing colourfully, chattering noisily for attention, the huge broadcast cameras sitting silently, unblinking in owl-like observance.

Centre of Attention

In the kind natural class that doesn’t come from any sort of practiced charm, Gretzky answered questions humbly for the media and laughed and chatted amiably with the enthusiastic crowd. As he was gracefully extracted by the relay support staff from what could have been an all-day engagement, it was clear that he was genuinely enjoying the moment as much as the spectators.

Torch Bearer #41

It was a special moment. That morning I was a somewhat apprehensive, slightly detached Olympic enthusiast, but an hour later I had found myself literally running to keep pace with events. I wasn’t alone either; it seemed that the crowds were deepening with each step of the torch bearers.

Torch Bearer #42

The Flame continued through the city, facilitated by the practiced routine of the torch relay team. While one team was prepping the next torch bearer with last minute instructions, another was behind the flame, providing after care which included removing the fuel bottle from the torch.

Inside the Olympic Torch

The smoothness at which the operation was proceeding certainly boded well for the coming endeavour. By this point the wispy corona of fear I felt was far over-shone by the excitement of the day.

Everywhere were enthusiasts, people excited to witness, not just the Olympic Flame, but also each other, each sharing a curious feeling of participation mixed with their celebration, together creating an atmosphere which would come to embody the magic of these games.

Magic in the Air

As the procession continued, it became apparent that, far from overkill, the considerable torch escort was barely enough to contain the massing crowds. It was as if Downtown Vancouver had shut down to watch the Olympics come to town. Men in business suits streamed from office buildings and ran like excited children to find a spot from which to watch.

"Gotta find a spot!"

The crowds spilled off the sidewalks, each person vying for a sightline, filling every available square foot of asphalt, encroaching ever further upon the torch’s path, together transforming the six-lane thoroughfare that was Georgia Street into a buzzing mass of onlookers.

Georgia Pedestrian Mall

Clinging to light-poles, teetering on tip-toes, and watching through viewfinders, the crowd anxiously strained for a view of the torchbearer, each glimpse cementing the reality of the moment, a moment of participation in something unique.

Olympic Enthusiasts

The flame marched on through the city, each step adding to the momentum built by the preceding 12,000 torchbearers, each handoff igniting fires in the eyes of those watching, in the flame’s wake a conflagration of passion and pride that was to engulf the entire city, the entire country.

Ignition

Before the first medal was awarded, before the first competition had taken place, and even before the Opening Ceremonies, the arrival of the torch to Vancouver brought the Olympics home for me. The wait was over, the games were here, and all indications suggested that they were about to exceed my wildest hopes.    

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