Today’s Question: Do you ever watermark your images when you share online? Any tips on how best to do that?
Tim’s Quick Answer: I don’t generally watermark my photos when sharing online, but a quick and easy way to add a watermark to a photo is to make use of the option available when exporting photos from Lightroom Classic.
More Detail: Personally, I tend not to watermark my photos when sharing online because I don’t want to have a watermark that distracts from the actual image. I fully realize that many photographers prefer to apply a watermark to help deter image theft, which is perfectly reasonable.
If you are using Lightroom Classic to manage your photos, it is very easy to add a watermark to your photos as part of the process of exporting images you’ll be sharing online.
In the Export dialog, you can of course configure the various settings for the images you want to export copies of, such as the location to save the images, the file format, resizing, and other settings. To add a watermark you can turn on the “Watermark” checkbox in the Watermarking section of the Export dialog. Then click the popup and either choose an existing watermark if you’ve created one, or choose “Edit Watermarks” if you want to define a new watermark.
In the Watermark Editor dialog that appears when you choose “Edit Watermarks”, you can choose between a Text or Graphic watermark style, and then configure the various settings. I typically use a clean sans-serif font set to a moderately low opacity setting when adding a watermark to an image.
Within the Watermark Editor dialog you’ll see a preview of the effect based on the currently selected image. When you’re happy with the watermark settings, click the Save button to bring up the New Preset dialog, where you can enter a meaningful name for the watermark and click the Create button to save your custom watermark. That watermark can then be selected by name from the Watermark popup in the Export dialog, so that the mark will be added to all images being exported for sharing.