Participating Frequently

Question

Remove watermark

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
May 18, 2020
4 replies
1703 views

My wife and I got married 2-6-2018. To cut a long story short: our photographer delivered the pictures with watermark.

After some inquiries she mentioned she lost the original pictures. I did my best to get them back, but it was impossible. She told me both backup diks had scrambled pictures, so she threw them out. (This was all a long time ago)

Now, we're still on speaking terms and she said she would remove the water mark. Either by photo shopping or by cropping the pictures. Not really what I like.

I shared those pictures with her (read only mode!) and am waiting for her to get back with the editted pictures.

Is there no way to remove the watermark? She has used Adobe Lightroom to put it in there.

Edit: I am not trying to get pictures without watermark for free without consent of the photographer. If someone comes back with a possible solution I will share this with her and ask her to apply it. She calls herself a technical noob, so if she has to get help, that is also an option of course. But the original pictures seem to be lost.

This topic has been closed for replies.

Michael J. Hoffman

Community Expert

When Lightroom applies a watermark, it creates a new copy of the image with the watermark as part of the image. It's not "on top" of the image, or "overlaid" or otherwise removeable. The pixels of the watermark are part of the pixels of the image. That's why its often very difficult to remove, depending on the level of detail in the area that the watermark has obscured.

As noted above, software that creates watermarks has to have had access to the original pristine copy to create the output - but if that original image was lost or destroyed, there's no "un-watermark feature" to get it back.

P

PlantjeAuthor

Participating Frequently

So, it is not removeable at all. You can only hide it.

I would expect Adobe to build in some sort of back door for people that have a photographer that doesn't know how to do her job. Like we do...

Unfortunately things didn't go that bad with a first photo shoot we had. She just messed up our wedding pictures. That's all...

dj_paige

Legend

"I would expect Adobe to build in some sort of back door for people that have a photographer that doesn't know how to do her job. Like we do..."

I think Adobe's logic here in the way it creates and handles watermarks is correct, and doesn't need to be changed. People need to learn the basics of any software in order to use it effectively. And, I point out that it is an extremely reasonable (even basic and fundamental) expectation that photographers keep their originals (which, by the way, was a reasonable expectation even before digital photography).

JP Hess

Inspiring

The key here is having access to the originals and ideally the software that created the watermarks in the first place.

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PlantjeAuthor

Participating Frequently

Ok, so the key is gone

JohanElzenga

Community Expert

It totally depends on the watermark and where it is located in the image. Some watermarks are almost impossible to remove (and that is the idea of watermarks), other watermarks take a few seconds.

-- Johan W. Elzenga

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PlantjeAuthor

Participating Frequently

That's not removing the watermark, that's hiding it.

We have a watermark over the face of the bass player of the band. That guy has deceased last year.

I talked to a local Apple expert store and there someone mentioned that if you apply a watermark you can tick or untick a box to either keep or not keep the originals. I think our photographer did a big oops there.

By the way... she has contacted me again for the pictures, because she lost the ones with watermark as well.

dj_paige

Legend

Apple experts are not experts in Lightroom.

Once a watermark is applied, you can't remove it from the exported image. The original image (which you no longer have access to) has no watermark, and would serve your purpose, if only they were available. If your photographer is someone who doesn't believe in keeping originals, I would not use him/her again.

dj_paige

Legend

Photoshop has the capability to do a decent job of removing watermarks, but I consider it to be a fairly advanced skill to get good results. Lightroom cannot do so.

P

PlantjeAuthor

Participating Frequently

So, Adobe has not built in any back door to remove something their software added. That's too bad.

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