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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A problem has been bugging me for quite a while now. Occasionally when working within the WordPress admin pages, checking the stats, updating posts, etc, a blank, all white page will be returned. When this happens the following error is output to the logs.

PHP Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 42467328) (tried to allocate 67105 bytes) in (docroot)/wp-content/plugins/jetpack/modules/stats.php on line 448

If you’ll notice, WordPress isn’t exactly asking for the moon. It’s using about 40MB of memory, and only asking for 70KB more. Surely, I should be well in the clear with this, especially since I’ve configured every memory setting I can think of upwards of 256MB.

This is a pretty common problem with the PHP script serving the WordPress site requiring more memory than is available or allowed. There are a number of suggested fixes, described below, but none worked for me, and I managed to simply work around the issue (by deactivating plugins) for quite a while. This wasn’t altogether satisfactory, and today I had no ‘superfluous’ plugins to deactivate, so I dug deeper into the world of hosting and PHP multi-user configuration.

Thankfully, I found the silver bullet, and have (hopefully) banished the White Screen of Death forever. If you’ve encountered the same problem, simply follow the steps below to solve the issue.

Step 1: Disable Plugins

This is the least helpful solution. But, if you are running out of memory, you can try simply using less memory. Once you’ve pared down your plugins to the minimum that you require, you’re going to have to actively increase the memory available to WordPress and/or PHP.

Step 2: Increase the WordPress Memory Limit

The next step is to check your wp-config.php file to ensure that WordPress is permitting itself enough memory. If this is the problem, you won’t be getting PHP fatal errors, but it may still present itself with the White Screen of Death. To increase the WordPress memory limit, add the following line to your wp-config.php file.

define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '256M');

256MB is more than enough for any WP site, but this will help diagnose where the issue lays. You may want to dial this back after things are working right. If that still doesn’t do the trick, it’s time to make sure that your server’s PHP memory limit is sufficient.

Step 3: Increase the Server PHP Memory Limit

You may not have access to your server’s PHP settings. So, to check and see what the memory limit is, you need to run a PHP Info utility. You can simply install the “PHP Server Info” plugin which displays the phpinfo() on a page in your admin screen. However, if you’re running into memory problems and can’t install another plugin, add a file named “phpinfo.php” to your WordPress document root with the following contents. Important: Be sure to delete this file after you’re finished, it’s not something you want publicly accessible.


<?php
// Show all information, defaults to INFO_ALL
phpinfo();
?>


Point your browser at http:///phpinfo.php, or go to the PHP Info plugin page in your WP admin pages and you’ll see the full text of the PHP configuration. Look for the line memory_limit, and check to see if it’s too low.

If yours is set to 16M or 32M, then this could be the culprit. You may want to bump it up to 256M while you’re troubleshooting, and find a suitable value once you’ve solved the problem. You can change this setting by editing or adding the following line in your server’s PHP.ini file (you may have to have your hosts do this).

memory_limit = 256M;

On my server, the PHP memory limit was set to 128M, which again is more than enough for the 40MB that I needed. Unfortunately, there didn’t seem to be any other solutions that I could try. As a result, I simply avoided the problem by disabling some plugins that I wanted, but could live without. This kept my memory usage under 40MB, but it was hardly an ideal solution. When I bumped up against the White Screen of Death again, and was out of plugins I could live without, I sought a proper solution. Fortunately I found it.

Step 4: Increase Server User Memory Limit

After some serious google sleuthing, I discovered that most hosts utilize various tools to limit the memory and CPU that each user can utilize. This makes sense, but naturally, can lead to lower available memory limits than PHP or WordPress thinks they are permitted.

What fixed the problem for me was increasing the Apache RLimitMEM to its max size. This can be set in the Apache configuration files or in your server’s .htaccess file. I didn’t have access to the Apache config files on my server, but I was able to access the .htaccess file. You may need to contact your host to do this.

To increase the amount of memory available to your hosting server user, simply modify or add the following line to your .htaccess file.

RLimitMEM max

Once I added that line, like magic, my White Screen of Death issues have disappeared. My WordPress install had been throttled by a somewhat obscure Apache setting, but now it was free to stretch its legs a bit. Hopefully this will work for you, and finally enable your true WordPress potential.

Edit: I’ve also discovered, this fixes the following https/cert error when trying to upgrade WordPress or install a plugin:

Download failed. error setting certificate verify locations: CAfile:
/[wordpress-location]/wp-includes/certificates/ca-
bundle.crt CApath: /etc/ssl/certs

After encountering the above error, and working with my host to exhaust all the potential cert-specific issues (cert validity, permissions in wordpress and /etc directories, et cetera…). Finally, I realized this was only occurring on one of the sites on my hosting environment, while working fine on my main sites. I tried setting the RLimitMEM to max, and it did the trick.    

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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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