Aper­ture vs Light­room: Water­marks with Light­room

Here’s Part 2 of the Aper­ture vs Light­room review of water­marks. I won’t tell you again about how I think water­marks are a hideous blight upon pho­tog­ra­phy, but you can read the first part of the post on Water­marks with Aper­ture if you’re truly curious.

Apply­ing Water­marks with Lightroom

Light­room is sim­i­lar to Aper­ture in that you apply your water­mark upon export. For­tu­nately for Light­room users, that’s where most of the sim­i­lar­i­ties end as Adobe packed more fea­tures to sup­port water­marks in Light­room than Apple gave to Aperture.

To get started, you can open the Water­mark Edi­tor from the menu bar by select­ing Light­room | Edit Watermarks…

Your first choice in the Water­mark Edi­tor is to decide whether you want to cre­ate a Text Water­mark or use a Graphic Water­mark that you cre­ated in another appli­ca­tion. The Text Water­mark is a very handy util­ity that Aper­ture lacks. If you’re one of the peo­ple using Light­room who doesn’t own Pho­to­shop or some other tool capa­ble of cre­at­ing a graph­i­cal image. then Adobe has you cov­ered. Text Water­marks may not be as pretty (or as hideous) as some graphic water­marks that I’ve seen, but they’re func­tional and easy to create.

Adding a Graphic Water­mark is rather sim­ple if you have a PNG or JPEG file to use. Sim­ply choose Graphic from the Water­mark Style radio but­tons and then upload your image in the Image Options seg­ment of the panel below. Just click the tri­an­gle to reveal the Upload field. For this exam­ple, I used a 1600×600 PNG file with the word DRAFT.

Why did I make it so big? Because graph­ics scale down in size rather nicely, but may get dis­torted if you try to upscale them.

Cre­at­ing a Text Water­mark in Lightroom

This is pretty easy. First, type the text you want to include in your water­mark in the text box pro­vided under your photo. The default shows a copy­right sym­bol and your name. You can see a pre­view in the photo, which changes as you make adjust­ments in the pan­els to the right of the photo.

Select the Text radio but­ton from the Water­mark Style and click the tri­an­gle next to Text Options to reveal the screen shown above. The options are rather famil­iar to any­one who used a text edi­tor or word proces­sor on a com­puter before. Select a Font, a Style (e.g., Reg­u­lar, Bold, Italic) and choose your align­ment (Left, Cen­ter, Right). The default color is White, but you have access to all the col­ors on your Mac just by click­ing the color box.

The next seg­ment lets you adjust the shadow of your text. Rather than try to describe their effects, I’ll leave these set­tings to your own explo­ration. Just don’t be dis­ap­pointed if you don’t see a shadow on a photo with a black background.

You’re not done yet. Both Text and Graphic water­marks can use the Water­mark Effects section.

Using Water­mark Effects

The Water­mark Effects seg­ment affects either type of water­mark, so be sure to review these fields before you Save your watermark.

Opac­ity does what you think — it changes the opac­ity of your water­mark, allow­ing a “see-through” effect of the photo behind the watermark.

The Size sec­tion is pretty use­ful. The image above shows the Fit option, which scales your water­mark to fit within the bound­aries of your image. Fill puts your graphic water­mark on the image at actual size, which may not fit on the photo you’re export­ing, as shown in the exam­ple below.

My pref­er­ence is to use the Pro­por­tional option and adjust the water­mark size with the slider, which ranges from 1 to 150. Here’s an exam­ple with the Pro­por­tional slider set to 10.

That enor­mous 1600×600 water­mark scales down nicely. It’s not even vis­i­ble at the very low end of the scale, but will rise up in size to the same as the Fill size option.

Skip­ping below the Inset slid­ers, the Anchor but­tons let you deter­mine roughly where to place your water­mark, giv­ing you nine options com­pared to five place­ment options in Aper­ture. Although you can’t angle your water­mark in Light­room or Aper­ture, at least Light­room allows you to rotate your water­mark, in case you want to have a ver­ti­cal display.

What about those Inset slid­ers that we skipped? Think of those as fine-tuning slid­ers for the Anchor points. You can adjust the loca­tion of your water­mark hor­i­zon­tally or ver­ti­cally. In the exam­ple below, I reduced the hor­i­zon­tal inset slightly to slide the ver­ti­cal water­mark over a bit, since I didn’t like the exact place­ment of the Anchor.

Once you’ve posi­tioned your water­mark as you like, hit Save to cre­ate the pre­set. Now you won’t have to go through all of this effort next time. You can just select your saved Water­mark pre­set when you export images.

Aper­ture vs Light­room: Summary

Light­room has a great water­mark tool. Nei­ther Aper­ture or Light­room have the capa­bil­ity to design a graph­i­cal water­mark, but Light­room over­comes that by pro­vid­ing text sup­port so every­one can have a func­tional water­mark. Toss in bet­ter scal­ing and place­ment options, Lightroom’s water­mark tool clearly beats Aperture’s offering.