Watermarks on images and how to remove a simple watermark. Learn how to quickly remove watermarks from photos

So, lately A lot of pictures on the Internet are protected with a watermark (aka Watermark). It is not clear why they do this, because there is almost no sense in it. A watermark does not give you copyright on the image, and if it contains a link, less than 0.1% of people will still enter it.

The reasons for removing Watermark can be different, and now I will tell you how to remove a watermark from a photo quickly and without problems. We only need one program, 8-10 megabytes in size, called Inpaint. At the time of writing (see date) of this article, latest version 6.2.

Inpaint interface and functionality

The program is simple, there is nothing complicated in the interface. Inpaint is actually designed to remove watermarks from images and photographs, but if you wish, you can cut out any object.

All we need to do is to select with a marker or other tool the area from which we will remove unnecessary elements, after which we use the same marker to select the donor, that is, the area from which the data will be selected to be filled.

It is best, of course, to remove them where the background is uniform, but if watermark is located right in front of a person’s eyes, complications may arise here.

Actually, watch this video, here I will show you how to remove a watermark from any picture. I myself applied two watermarks to the image, one in the form transparent pictures, the other in the form of an inscription. It turned out a little crooked, but overall Inpaint coped with the task.

So, recently a lot of pictures on the Internet are protected with a watermark (aka Watermark). It is not clear why they do this, because there is almost no sense in it. A watermark does not give you copyright on the image, and if it contains a link, less than 0.1% of people will still enter it.

Inpaint interface and functionality

The program is simple, there is nothing complicated in the interface. Inpaint is actually designed to remove watermarks from images and photographs, but if you wish, you can cut out any object.

It is best, of course, to remove them where the background is uniform, but if the watermark is located right in front of a person’s eyes, then complications can arise.

Actually, watch this video, here I will show you how to remove a watermark from any picture. I myself applied two watermarks to the image, one in the form of a transparent picture, the other in the form of an inscription. It turned out a little crooked, but overall Inpaint coped with the task.

For what beautiful photos and pictures on the Internet are spoiled by watermarks? How to remove these translucent inscriptions?

Firstly, you need to understand why watermarks are placed in the first place. The watermark is the most effective way protect a photograph or drawing from use. Watermarks are ideal for designers, photographers, and artists to protect their work from theft.

On the one hand, watermarks do not interfere with viewing the image, on the other hand, it is extremely difficult to remove the protection, and no one will use crossed out pictures with other people’s contacts.

Most often, photos with watermarks sell. By paying for a work of art you will receive it without protection and full moral right to use it for your own purposes.

Sometimes photographs are not sold, but watermarks are added for marking purposes, for the author's signature, or to indicate the source. Typically this is placed at the edge of the image and does not block views.

No matter how trivial it may sound, but the very first and most best way removing watermarks is buying the work. Think about how long it will take you to create something like this? Most likely, for such work you would ask no less than it costs you. Any work must be paid.

In addition, you can only remove a watermark manually by sketching the background underneath it, and this is a very labor-intensive process.

Either you spend the money and get a quality product with the right to use it, or large number labor and a mutilated image, without the right to use it.

Therefore, by paying money for someone else’s work you get every right use the work for your commercial projects. By far the most large service for selling photographs, drawings, videos and even music - is

Buying one image is always more expensive than a set or an annual subscription.

Retouching

If you do not want to buy the image, but want to remove the watermarks manually, then you will need Photoshop program, a large amount of time and possession of minimal artistic skills.

When the image has a grid dotted with logos, or the logo is located right in the center, then it needs to be sketched with a background lying around it. To do this, Photoshop uses retouching tools. For example, .

While holding ALT key show a similar area to the one under the watermark. And then paint it over.

There are two more very convenient automatic tool"Patch" (Patch Tool) and "Spot Healing Brush" (Spot Healing Brash Tool).

Using a “spot” brush, just paint over the icon and it will disappear. And “Patch” - circle the watermark and drag it to where it is not.

As mentioned above, such a sketch is very labor-intensive. One image can take up to several hours of jewelry work. And even after this, the image will not look like the original one at the protection site. Therefore, it is worth making an effort in the beginning to contact the author of the image and buy.

For example, microsinks are mainly protected by mesh, which is difficult to remove. In the image you can find the name of the stock and the picture number.

What if the work is not sold and the logo or inscriptions are placed for other reasons? In this case, the following methods will help you:

Crop image

If the image only has a small logo in the corner, try simply cropping it by making the image smaller. Surely nothing important will be lost.

If the integrity of the image is important, try painting the logo as a background using the retouching tools described in the previous step.

Draw a picture

This method is only suitable for vector drawings. If the image is vector and not complex, it will be easier than covering up the watermarks:

In other cases, it is enough to increase the “Levels” in Photoshop so that the watermark disappears completely. Simply put, you need to cut off the range of gray pixels by setting the sliders as shown in the figure.

Naturally, this technique is only suitable for black and white images, where cutting off the range with gray pixels will not affect the picture in any way. But at the intersections there is still a stain left on the neck of the guitar.

Watermarks in Microsoft Word

To remove a watermark in Microsoft program Word 2016 click - Design/Background/Remove backing.

Sometimes, a watermark refers to headers and footers. To delete them, you need to double-click and erase the text or delete the picture.

Removing watermarks in PDF

Full PDF editing file is only available in Adobe Acrobat. For this he has a special tool - Edit PDF.

A watermark or mark – call it what you want – is a kind of signature of the author under his works. Some sites also watermark their images.

Often such inscriptions prevent us from using pictures downloaded from the Internet. I'm not talking about piracy now, that's immoral, but just for personal use, perhaps for making collages.

Removing an inscription from a picture in Photoshop can be quite difficult, but there is one universal method, which works in most cases.

I have such a work with a signature (mine, of course).

Now let's try to remove this signature.

The method is very simple in itself, but sometimes, in order to achieve an acceptable result, additional steps must be taken.

So, we have opened the image, create a copy of the layer with the image by dragging it onto the icon shown in the screenshot.

Now it's time to analyze the inscription.

As you can see, the background under the inscription is not uniform; there is both pure black and various details of other colors.

Let's try to apply the technique in one pass.

Select the inscription as close to the text boundaries as possible.

Then right-click inside the selection and select "Perform Fill".

In the window that opens, select from the drop-down list "Content-Based".

And press "OK".

Deselect ( CTRL+D) and we see the following:

There is damage to the image. If the background were without sharp changes in color, even if not monochromatic, but with a texture and artificially applied noise, then we would be able to get rid of the signature in one pass. But in in this case you'll have to sweat a little.

We will remove the inscription in several passes.

Select a small section of the inscription.

We fill according to the content. We get something like this:

Use arrows to move the selection to the right.

Fill it again.

Move the selection again and fill it again.

Now select a tool "Brush" with hard edges.

Press and hold the key ALT and click on the black background next to the inscription. We paint over the rest of the text with this color.

As you can see, there are remains of a signature on the hood.

We will paint them over with a tool "Stamp". Size is adjustable square brackets on the keyboard. It should be such that a piece of texture fits into the stamp area.

Clamp ALT and by clicking we take a texture sample from the image, and then move it to the right place and click again. This way you can even restore a damaged texture.

“Why didn’t we do this right away?” - you ask. “For educational purposes,” I will answer.

We have sorted out perhaps the most complex example How to remove text from a picture in Photoshop. Once you master this technique, you can easily remove unnecessary elements such as logos, text, (garbage?), etc.

On at the moment Photo watermarks are the most popular standard for copyright protection. They allow you to identify the real author and prevent you from using the image illegally. However, the effectiveness of watermarks should be questioned.

As shown Google company In my research, removing classic watermarks is quite easy. The weak point is the similarity in the processing of each photo. It is enough to figure out once exactly how the watermarks are located, and it becomes possible to create reverse algorithm, which gives the output the original image.

To remove watermarks, a large number of photographs with the same watermarks are run through neural network to identify similarities. Watermarks become a common feature of the sample, and the photographs themselves are identified as noise. After identifying the watermark, it is necessary to determine its intensity. Now the superimposed watermark can be subtracted from the image to obtain the original image.

Google offers a solution

Fortunately, Google not only identified the problem, but also suggested good decision. If you change the watermarks randomly each time, distorting them a little, then restoring the original becomes much more difficult.

It becomes obvious that even a minimal change in a watermark, such as font distortion, leads to this method into disrepair or make fraud much more difficult.