Photoshop vs Visual Watermark

Here I watermark a series of images using Photoshop and then using Visual Watermark – a specialized watermarking software. The latter works better for watermarking, but Photoshop has so many features… and it is a single program that can do everything.

For a step-by-step photoshop watermarking tutorial see here: Batch Watermarking with Photoshop

Video Script

Hi, I’m Ivan. I will watermark a series of images using Photoshop and Visual Watermark maker. I want to find out which one of these programs marks images faster.

I started with Photoshop. This is an amazing tool and personally I like it very much. Almost all artwork on our website was made using it. It has tons of features and one of them is batch automation. This thing repeats a recorded action on every picture in a selected folder. So, if you create an action that draws a string of text over a photo, you will watermark all of your pictures.

You can see that I’ve started recording an action. I’m going to make a glass-like watermark. I want it to be in the center of a picture and cover all picture width. This is a simple task and usually it takes just a couple of minutes. But it has a pitfall – you cannot make any mistakes. If you did, you should redo everything from the beginning. I have to be very careful.

Fortunately, I made no mistakes and continue to the automation batch operation. They say, you should provide a source and output folder, select an action to take on your pictures and click the Process button. But Photoshop also requires you to provide JPEG quality. What’s worse it doesn’t save your answer and requires you to provide it for every picture in the set. If you have 10 pictures, you will click the OK button 10 times, if you have a hundred, you will click it one hundred times. If you have a thousand pictures, well, you may not finish until tomorrow.

As you can see the watermark looks fine on the first picture, but the second one has a crop at the left and right sides. Either other pictures have. This happened because the first picture is slightly bigger than following pictures and Photoshop doesn’t know how to scale the watermark to fit it into a canvas. If some of your pictures are bigger than others, you will get cropped or small watermarks.

This may sound unimportant if you have a single camera and take landscape pictures only. But for the majority of photographers this means they have to design a watermark that looks fine when it is both small and too large.

Here is Visual Watermark, our watermarking tool. It lacks 99 percent of Photoshop features and it is the program the size of a shoe but it can watermark a group of pictures much better than Photoshop. Basically, you should drag your images into the program, design a watermark and click the Watermark button. Visual Watermark takes care about everything else.

Our watermark is placed into the center of every picture and scaled down to fit the picture width. And it took just 5 minutes.

Photoshop is a very powerful tool but specialized programs can solve multi-file tasks better.