Watermarking for Branding - Questions on Best Practices

Oakley · February 29, 2012

My primary goal: Watermark my images with my name and my website so I can encourage social media sharing (mainly pinterest and facebook - but also blogging and twitter).

My secondary goal: Keep the process simple and keep my photos beautiful.

Knowing that Pinterest is growing like CRAZY, and that people can "Pin" your photos using the Pin It bookmarklet tool I really wanted to find a way to brand my images so people could find their way back to my site and become leads and customers!

First things first, for you (or anyone!) to share your photos on pinterest, you have to make sure your images are NOT right-click-protected. (A bummer, but I'm willing to risk it to make sure my work is in Pinterest).

Now I prefer to NOT imprint my watermark in Lightroom or Photoshop as I want my clients to purchase the clean photos in SmugMug.

So that means I'm going to be using the SmugMug watermarking tool.

Which is fine. Cause I've tested it, and the watermark STAYS when the image is shared through SmugMug (example of an watermarked image on Pinterest).

All good.

So I guess my issue is with my new branded watermark design. The text is too big IMHO for landscape images and maybe too small for portraits.

What do you think? (Note - I used the same watermark file for both of these images)

I really don't want to have 2 different watermarks - one for portraits and one for landscapes. That's too much work.

Any suggestions? Or words of encouragement?

:wink

Thanks!!

Ryan

Glort · February 29, 2012

If you are going to try and put your images out there, don't complain if one of them gets used on a site or an ad or whatever.
Don't put any image up you don't want to be used somewhere or some how without your permission.

Oakley · February 29, 2012

Glort wrote: »

If you are going to try and put your images out there, don't complain if one of them gets used on a site or an ad or whatever.
Don't put any image up you don't want to be used somewhere or some how without your permission.

Ha! I won't complain - I'll be thrilled. I've always felt uneasy about the "It's mine, back off!" mentality that old-school photographers have. And when I joined the club I took on some of those old mindsets --- keep all images from the client, right-click protect, watermark, chain-up and lock-down.

Forget about it.

Sharing is caring.

I now include all my full res photos in all my wedding and family shoots. I don't want to keep those photos --- I want the family to have them. Sure they might buy prints from walmart, but I tell them they can get much better prints from ordering on my site - and 90% of them do just that.

Now I know there's a few different camps on this subject - and I can see if you've got photos that you are trying to sell commercially (magazines, websites, realators, etc.) then it might be a different story.

But for me and my work - I'm all about sharing. Far and wide.

So....any thoughts on the watermark Glort?

Glort · February 29, 2012

To me, the watermarks at very least on these pics don't stand out enough to achieve what you are looking for to my way of thinking. I have to really squint to see it on those images so it doesn't promote well at all to my way of thinking.

I think the white banding obscures the image too much and sells too little.

I would be going for the text and a logo with alternate black and white drop shadows. That way whether you put the mark on a light or dark background it will stand out and be easily seen.

I agree in part with your including originals on wedding etc. I have been doing that for years amongst all the cries of giving your work, heart, and soul away as well as the " Only I can photofiddle my work so it looks decent and doesn't destroy my cred as a shooter" mentality.
I'm an old school shooter and all that keeping the negs was very BAD advise and lost me a lot of potential earnings.

These days I use the inclusion of the originals to leverage a higher price for my services and I make what I can while the images have some value to the clients.

As for just giving images away for he family to enjoy etc, I have serious reservations about that as a business practice.
seems to me it wouldn't take long for people to realize they can buy a minimum of pics and get them all from you and I believe that is what they will do.
I don't know, I have never tried your approach. It may be a winner but i fear if it's not you may have a lot of trouble re-establishing yourself if it does not.

Good luck with it though. It would be bloody nice to think something as good willed as this could be financially viable as well.

zoomer · February 29, 2012

Lets take a poll. Who stops to read watermarks? I know I never do.
As an advertising tool seems worthless to me.
As a device to keep people from stealing your pictures, they have to be so big that they obscure the photo.

Find better ways to drive business, watermarking your photos isn't going to do it.

Of course this is just my opinion/experience, if someone has any evidence to the contrary I am more that open to it.

If you insist, some of the best watermarks I have seen have been used as gray borders with about 50 percent opacity that run up one side of the photo. Then you can make it big enough to be seen but not overly obtrusive to the photo..of course it is easy enough for someone to crop the watermark off if they care that much.

mkl · March 1, 2012

the thing about pinterest (and tumblr, etc) is that sometimes an image gets passed around so much that all that's left is the image itself... and there have been plenty of photos whose photographer i haven't been able to find with google images or tineye because the photos just weren't popular enough to be indexed. so as someone who agrees with the op about sharing, i'd go for a watermark that's unobtrusive, but that will give whoever really wants to know enough information to find the source.

i wouldn't use the gray band on my work (nature, landscape, etc), but the style does seem to be popular with wedding and portrait photographers, and think it can be fairly stylish. i'd go for something more like the vertical photo in terms of relative size - and that does mean separate watermarks for horizontal and vertical photos in order for the branding to be consistent at viewing size. it's kind of a pain (i wish that smugmug could associate photos with a given watermark based on size ratio on upload), but i let smugmug watermark all images with a default watermark, then switch to the one that's more appropriate in orientation and color after the upload if necessary.

the last part of my 2¢ is that while i can handle a well-done vertical watermark, the ones that frame a corner (both vertical and horiz components) are really visually distracting.

Oakley · March 1, 2012

mkl wrote: »

the thing about pinterest (and tumblr, etc) is that sometimes an image gets passed around so much that all that's left is the image itself... and there have been plenty of photos whose photographer i haven't been able to find with google images or tineye because the photos just weren't popular enough to be indexed. so as someone who agrees with the op about sharing, i'd go for a watermark that's unobtrusive, but that will give whoever really wants to know enough information to find the source.

i wouldn't use the gray band on my work (nature, landscape, etc), but the style does seem to be popular with wedding and portrait photographers, and think it can be fairly stylish. i'd go for something more like the vertical photo in terms of relative size - and that does mean separate watermarks for horizontal and vertical photos in order for the branding to be consistent at viewing size. it's kind of a pain (i wish that smugmug could associate photos with a given watermark based on size ratio on upload), but i let smugmug watermark all images with a default watermark, then switch to the one that's more appropriate in orientation and color after the upload if necessary.

the last part of my 2¢ is that while i can handle a well-done vertical watermark, the ones that frame a corner (both vertical and horiz components) are really visually distracting.

That was a very valuable 2 cents. Thanks so much for that.

I'm starting to think going with a separate portrait and landscape watermark is the way I'll have to go.

Cindy · March 3, 2012

I recently started adding this to mine for Facebook & it does indeed drive traffic to my site. Works on both landscape or portrait but does size slightly different. I have a second wm which displays the logo on the left side when the right is to obtrusive. I was really concerned about it being to 'in your face' & that people wouldn't like it but the only people who've complained are photographers to let me know they didn't like it. The mostly transparent middle swash doesn't show up most of the time... only on solid colors. It's still on all the photos but it sorta hides when there's texture in the image so that you have to really hunt for it.

daylightimages · March 3, 2012

I went with a corner watermark that shows my website. Maybe watermarks that have both horizontal and vertical components are a little annoying, but if someone is annoyed by it then it means they noticed it.

orljustin · March 4, 2012

Glort wrote: »

If you are going to try and put your images out there, don't complain if one of them gets used on a site or an ad or whatever.
Don't put any image up you don't want to be used somewhere or some how without your permission.

Normally you have good posts, but this one is pretty stupid. Displaying an image for you purposes does not mean you are giving it to the world for free usage, and cannot get upset when someone infringes your rights.

ian408 · March 4, 2012

If you're considering using a watermark for branding, then a logo would be much better than text/number/etc. At least in my opinion. A logo says more and can be used in many ways to establish brand recognition.

To me, a watermark is something you use when you don't want someone to copy something-like a big X across the image. Or maybe repeating lines of text. A brand mark would be a better description of a recognizable logo somewhere on the image. Of course, you want something to steer people to your site too but the logo is what they should recognize first.

Daniel UK · March 4, 2012

We use Smugmug for our Scout Group, We like to share, show the world what we are doing, and how much fun our young people are having. But I decided to use a watermark so people knew who we were and where the photo has come from, very much in the same way as you are wanting.

We used our logo and web address as part of the watermark. (It could be a little better, maybe a drop shadow but it does what we set out to achieve).

Watermarking for Branding - Questions on Best Practices

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