Watermarking Your Wedding Photos

Over at the Trash The Dress post, there was some discussion over using watermarks on photos so I thought I would give my opinion and share some useful tools you can use to watermark the images on your website.

What Is Watermarking?

In this context, watermarks refer to the image, pattern or text that people place on their photos/images. Usually the watermark is a reference to the author e.g. it could be their logo or perhaps website URL.

In my opinion they serve 2 purposes:

1. If someone shares the photo amongst friends or on social sites such as Flickr or Facebook, people will know who the person that took the photo is.

This is a great way of advertising virally, i.e. your brand is spread to many people with little effort.

2. The second reason you may want to watermark your wedding photos is to prevent others from stealing your work and crediting themselves for it.

This is a common occurrence which watermarking helps to prevent (although some naughty people use image editing software to remove the watermark).

Watermarking Guidelines

It comes down to personal preference as to what kind of watermark you use in photos.

In my opinion watermarks should:

• Not distract from the original photo – a small watermark along the bottom of the photo is my preference
• Credit the author of the image – the name and/or website URL of the author should be visible
• Retain brand values – if possible it’s good to include your logo but this isn’t essential

Berkshire wedding photographer Paul Glavin is a great example of someone who uses watermarks well in his photos. They are subtle yet convey the name of the author and his logo.

Watermarking Tools

Here are some useful tools to help you create your watermarks.

Free Online Tools

PicMarkr

Watermarktool

Photoshop

Photoshop is the standard tool for most professional photographers and graphic designers. Watermarking can be done efficiently using the batch processing tools available.

The following are some Photoshop tutorials to help you watermark images although some of the examples are pretty gastly in my opinion.

• ehow – How To add a Watermark Using Phoshop
• Photoshop 911 – Watermarking in Photoshop
• dpjounal – Adding Copyright With Photoshop
• Developer Tutorials – Making Your Own Watermark With Photoshop
• ephotozine – Watermarking Your Photos in Photoshop 7 and CS

Windows Software

For software that will work on most modern versions of Windows e.g. XP and Vista

WinWatermark

Visual Watermark

Mac Software

iWatermark – compatible with both Windows and Macs

Do you watermark the images on your site?
Which tools do you use?