Adobe adds Easy Watermarking to Lightroom 3

June 8, 2010 in General, Mac by Angelina Roberts

Previously we demonstrated how easy it is to add watermarks to your photos using the Mogrify plugin for Lightroom 2. With the release of Lightroom 3 Adobe have replaced the need for a plugin with a built-in preset option.

Creating a watermark is simple and LR3 offers both image and text watermarking directly within the application. To get started click the “Lightroom” menu and select “Edit Watermarks”. A window should appear as shown below.

On the top of the window you can select either a text or image watermark. If you want to use an image then you should create a transparent .png file for best effect. (Read the Watermarking in Lightroom 2 for more information).

Adobe offer a massive amount of control over the application of your watermark file. You adjust opacity, finely tune the position of the watermark and change both the size and location.

Once you are happy with the design you can save and name your watermark. You are not restricted to a single watermark, in fact you can have multiple versions of the same watermark file.

Change the watermark location and click save and name the preset accordingly. For example you might have watermark-left, watermark-right for different alignments.

You watermark can not be applied to any image your export. You will see the option to select a watermark in the main export window.

Click the dropdown to select the watermark you would like to apply to the exported image. In this case mine was called simply “Watermark”.

The final image with watermark is below :

If you prefer the output of the mogrify plugin the good news is that is still works in version 3 of Lightroom.  I predict moving to text based easy watermarking using the built in LR3 service in the very near future.