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Why do beautiful photographs and drawings on the Internet get spoiled with watermarks? How to remove these translucent inscriptions?
Firstly, you need to understand why watermarks are placed in the first place. A watermark is the most effective way to protect a photo or drawing from being used. 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, the very first and best way to remove watermarks is to buy 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 money and get a high-quality product with the right to use it, or a lot of work and a mutilated image, without the right to use it.
Therefore, by paying money for someone else’s work, you get the full right to use the work for your own commercial projects. Today, the largest 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 don't want to buy an image, but want to remove the watermarks manually, then you will need Photoshop, a lot of time and 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, .
Hold down the ALT key and show a similar area to the one that lies under the watermark. And then paint it over.
There are two more very convenient automatic tools: the Patch Tool and the 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 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 editing of a PDF 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 caption their images this way. In this tutorial we will talk about how to get rid of watermarks using Photoshop.
Removing Watermarks in Photoshop
Often such inscriptions prevent us from using pictures downloaded from the Internet. We are not talking about piracy now, it is immoral and, more importantly, illegal, we are talking about personal use, perhaps for making collages. Removing an inscription from a picture in Photoshop can be quite difficult, but there is one universal method that works in most cases. We have this work with a signature:
Now let's try to remove this signature. The method is very simple in itself, but sometimes, in order to achieve an acceptable result, it is necessary to perform additional steps.
- 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.
- Next, select a tool "Rectangular area" on the left panel.
- 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".
Click "OK". Deselect ( CTRL+D) and we see the following:
- There is damage to the image. If the background had been without sharp changes in color, even if not monochromatic, but with texture and artificially applied noise, then we would have been able to get rid of the signature in one pass. But in this case you will 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.
- Next we proceed step by step.
The main thing is not to capture the black background with the selection.
- Now select a tool "Brush".
Form "Hard round".
- 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". The size is adjusted by square brackets on the keyboard. It should be such that a piece of texture fits into the stamp area.
Clamp ALT and click to 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,” we will answer.
We have discussed perhaps the most difficult example of how to remove text from a picture in Photoshop. Once you master it, you can easily remove unnecessary elements such as logos, text, junk, etc.
How to remove watermarks from a picture is a question asked by everyone who wants to place high-quality pictures on their website, but does not have the required amount to pay for the services of the paid photo hosting service on which they are located. Below I have provided a whole guide on how to remove watermarks from a picture or image using or without Photoshop.
Let's say you need to prepare a presentation within an hour, but you don't have enough images to complete it. You send your wishes to the design department and have the right to believe that your wishes are clear. You urgently need to make adjustments to the received images, but for some reason, you cannot access the originals.
Be that as it may, the reason why you need to remove watermarks from a photo varies. Maybe you urgently need to fix your presentation, as already mentioned, or maybe you just feel sorry for spending a small amount of money to buy a unique picture on a photo hosting site. In this case, I certainly would not recommend wasting your time on removing watermarks, but paying money and doing more serious things, since your time also has a certain value.
How to remove watermarks from a picture
It takes a lot of effort to remove watermarks from an image, so if you're reading this guide, then you've considered the pros and cons and decided that removing the watermark is worth the time and effort!
FreeImages
Another equally useful photo hosting site that allows you to search for high resolution photos. In the example above, I was looking for an image of a person who is thoughtful or angry. We type in the search query “Angry man” - and we can see some pretty interesting pictures with similar meanings, so I don’t have to edit them in Photoshop:
Sometimes a faster solution to a problem will be to enter an open door than to break into a closed one. Consider alternative sources if the goal is not to use the exact same image.
Step 3: How to remove watermarks from photos
At this stage, you will have to make one of the following decisions:
- I can't buy the original picture
- I can't find a picture without a watermark
- I can't find another picture that makes sense.
Now you have already decided that you want to learn how to remove watermarks from a picture and this will be the simplest solution.
It's decided. Let's spend our time and figure out how to get rid of two types of watermarks. Below you will see how you can solve the problem with each of them.
Cut out small watermarks
There are many images that are watermarked without taking up much space. Here's what it might look like:
And in most cases, the quickest solution is to simply remove the area where the watermark is located. Depending on its location, you may lose a small section of the picture, but the essence will not change:
The fastest and crudest way to do this would be. On Windows, users can use the Snipping Tool function, and users on the Mac operating system can use the keyboard shortcut command+shift+4 to activate screen capture tools. Mac users can then also use the Preview feature to crop out part of the image.
Well, if you still decide to take advantage of all the benefits of Photoshop, here's how to do it:
Look on the toolbar for various buttons. Use the Frame button and move the area below to cut off the unnecessary part, and then press ENTER.
For more complex cases we use the filling function
Photoshop (CS5 and later) has a feature called "Fill" that is great for these cases. It is, of course, far from ideal, but it allows you to speed up the work process significantly. Please remember that our goal is to be fast and quality enough to use.
This function allows you to convert photos with more complex watermarks, like those shown in the picture:
And convert them to this:
This is a fairly quick process and will take about 3 minutes. Such a rough image conversion is quite controversial, since it is suitable in most cases, but nevertheless, if you look closely at the cleaned image for more than a couple of seconds, you can see some flaws in certain places.
Here are the functions we will use to work:
1. Use a rectangular marquee or lasso to select an area of the picture
You should tackle the simplest areas first. Don't try to select the entire watermark, do it step by step, this way you can have better control over the process and also perform undo operations rather than starting all over again. In addition, you may find that after editing individual parts of the sign, the image becomes acceptable, and you no longer need to waste time on processing.
The Rectangular Marquee command allows you to select areas in the form of a rectangle, while the Lasso command allows you to select any shape. The "Scale" command allows you to zoom in or . To edit, I used the Lasso function and started from the top left corner:
2. Editing the area
After selecting the area, go to the Editing section in the toolbar and select Fill from the drop-down list. A dialog box will appear as shown in the picture. All you have to do is click OK and the program will do everything necessary itself.
As you work, you may notice small flaws, but you can use the undo function and select the area again, slightly changing the selection of the area until you achieve the desired result. Try to keep the area you select as close to the edges of the watermark as possible.
The filling process is shown below as an animation:
In this way, you can repeat the process until you have cleared the entire image and the process of how to remove watermarks from a picture will be longer, but you will not have to pay money for the desired image, which is available for a fee.
And in conclusion, there is information for those who have long wanted to learn how to make money from affiliate programs and choose a profitable niche for making money. Just recently a wonderful free course on making money with affiliate programs for beginners was released. Even if you have never encountered the technical nuances of promoting affiliate programs, in just a couple of evenings you will be able to master the practice of working with affiliate programs and be able to make a profit! Briefly, the lessons included in this course:
- theory of affiliate programs
- search for profitable affiliate programs
- how to get traffic from social networks, forums and banners
- setting up YouTube and getting traffic
- how to increase traffic from affiliate programs
And that’s all for me, I hope the article will help you find and edit any pictures that you need for your work.
Photo watermarks are currently 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 Google showed in its study, 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 an inverse algorithm that gives the output an original image.
To remove watermarks, a large number of photos with the same watermark are run through a 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
Luckily, Google not only identified the problem, but also came up with a good solution. 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 the watermark, such as distortion of the font, will render this method unusable or make fraud much more difficult.
Example of how the algorithm works
Tali Dekel / YouTube
Researchers from Google Research have developed an algorithm to automatically remove watermarks from stock images. Since such images typically have the same watermark, an algorithm based on many such images can calculate its outline with high accuracy and then cut it out without leaving a trace. At the same time, the researchers proposed a defense against such illegal acquisition of images - to create a unique watermark for each image with slight differences. The study is reported on the company's blog.
Many sites, including the media, do not hire their own photographers, but use the services of photo banks - special sites that collect millions of photographs on a variety of topics. To allow the user to evaluate the photo before purchasing, many of these sites show the photo in reduced resolution with a watermark applied. It doesn't interfere much when selecting an image, but it can be difficult to remove due to its translucency.
Researchers from Google have shown the fundamental vulnerability of most photo banks. The fact is that usually a photo stock site uses the same watermark for all images. Since watermarks often consist of many symbols and lines, it is quite problematic to determine it qualitatively from one image. Developers at Google solved this problem by feeding the algorithm a lot of images. It found matches in images and turned them into a signal and the rest of the image into noise. Thus, based on hundreds of images, the algorithm obtained the exact contours of the watermark and its transparency. Having this data, removing the watermark automatically is not a problem.
Researchers have demonstrated the successful operation of the algorithm on popular photo banks such as Adobe Stock or Fotolia. But the goal of the work was to create protection against this method of obtaining images. To do this, the researchers tried several options. Randomly moving the watermark or its transparency had virtually no effect on the algorithm's performance. However, it turned out that even an almost invisible random distortion of the contours of a watermark, for example the contours of fonts, causes the appearance of many noticeable defects in the final image. The more changes made, the more difficult it became for the algorithm to remove the watermark. The researchers hope that their work will help photo bank owners combat piracy more effectively.
Google researchers are not the first to propose using randomness to protect against piracy or counterfeiting. For example, British scientists decided to protect documents by randomly distributing cellulose fibers in paper into a digital key unique to every sheet in the world. And Korean scientists use random processes at the micro level to create unique and unforgeable identifiers.
Grigory Kopiev