In this tutorial I’ll show you how to create a watermark that will appear on top your image when you export it. I should point out that your watermark is applied to your photos as you export them, it won’t appear on your original photos. You can create both a text watermark as well as an image watermark and position it precisely on on your photos. And like everything in Lightroom it’s easy to go back and change it or create a new one. Just watch this video to get started on creating your own watermark preset.
Simple Steps for Watermarking Your Images
Let’s go ahead and select a few images and right click on them and select Export. That opens the Export dialog box. Now we can choose things we want to apply to our photo, and going down to the Watermarking area and check the watermark box. In the pull-down menu there is a Simple Copyright option and that pulls the info from the Creator field if you have previously created a copyright metadata preset. If you use this option it will add watermark text in the lower left corner of your image and there is no control over placement, size, font or opacity, you have to stick with the default.
Instead I will choose Edit Watermark. In this dialog you have two choices, you can add a text watermark or a graphic and choose a JPG or PNG file from your computer to use as the watermark. Let’s try the text watermark. You can put anything you want in the text area, just try to keep it simple and legible. I will add a copyright with my name. The copyright symbol may or may not already be there as a default. On mine it says the word copyright. If you want to use the symbol, on MAC hit Option G, if you are on a PC you can either just put parentheses around the letter “c” (c) or if you have a side keypad hold down the Alt key and type 0169 to get the copyright symbol.
Under Effects you can adjust the size and choose proportional, fit or fill. I will use proportional because it will look the same on various sizes of images. You can choose the Inset which is how from from the edgrd, and what it anchors to like the left, right, top bottom. You can even rotate it vertical by clicking on the arrows. It’s a good idea to preview it with horizontal and vertical photos.
You can also change the font and the style. You can also change the opacity so it looks more subtle. You can turn on or off a shadow and adjust the offset which is how far out from the text and the radius and angle. I’m going to keep mine simple.
When you are satisfied with yours, click Save and you will be prompted to name it. I will call it Bottom right. Now I can hit export and export my photos. Let’s open one and here we can see the watermark.
Let’s go back into the export dialog and I want to show you a few things. Checking the watermark box we can now see the watermark I created earlier in the list. Or I can click on edit Watermarks to create another one or I can select another watermark and edit it, rename it or delete it.
You have the same options if you want to create a graphic watermark. This watermark editor works similarly in variously versions of Lightroom including 5 and 6/CC.
Be sure to check out my video on creating a copyright metadata preset if you want to add a copyright to your images.