Coverage against intrusion
A single mark in a corner is the least intrusive watermark there is, and the easiest to get rid of: one crop and it is gone. A mark repeated across the whole frame is the opposite — no crop survives it, and it sits on the subject. Everything on this page is about choosing a point between those two on purpose, with the numbers in front of you rather than a guess.
The studio opens with repeating on, at the Standard density, and two small previews on your own picture — a diagonal brick lattice and straight rows — so the choice is made on the photograph rather than in the abstract. The crop check on the stage draws the largest clean crop as a dashed rectangle and says how much of the picture it keeps.
Spacing, angle and rows
| Density preset | Light 2.4 × 3.2 at 18 %, Standard 1.6 × 2.4 at 25 %, Dense 1.1 × 1.6 at 30 %. A preset sets numbers; every one stays editable. |
|---|---|
| Gap across, gap down | Multiples of the mark's own width and height, so the lattice keeps its density on a small web copy and on a large original. |
| Angle | −90° to +90° for the whole lattice. The default is −30°. |
| Brick or straight | Brick shifts every second row by half a cell, which breaks up the columns a straight lattice makes. |
The lattice is laid from the centre of each picture and drawn as one pattern fill by the canvas rather than one drawing call per copy, so a lattice of eighty-odd copies costs the same as one and a 40-megapixel frame stays quick to save.
What a crop can and cannot do to a lattice
The crop check is measured, not estimated. The mark is drawn — by the same renderer as the export — fully opaque on a small transparent copy of the frame, every pixel it touches is marked, and the largest rectangle that touches none of them is found, once at the picture’s own proportions and once at any proportions. A corner mark on a landscape photo typically leaves a crop of seventy per cent or more; a Standard lattice typically leaves one or two per cent, because no rectangle of any size can sit between the copies.
- It measures cropping only. Any visible mark can be painted out with enough effort; covering more of the subject makes that harder and makes the picture harder to enjoy.
- It is measured to the nearest cell of a grid about 320 pixels across, so the figure is good to about half a per cent of the frame.
Density on small screens
A lattice that looks gentle on a laptop can be loud on a phone, where the whole photograph is the width of a thumb and the wording becomes texture. Check it at phone size before a whole folder goes through: the recipe proof under the stage shows the same settings on a landscape, a portrait and a square crop of your picture. For proofs sent to clients, Dense with a short word such as PROOF reads as a pattern rather than as wording. For document copies, a diagonal line of the purpose and date at about 20 % is the convention — see the document page.
Questions about tiled watermarks
How dense should a repeated watermark be?
Start with Standard — gaps of 1.6 times the mark's width across and 2.4 times its height down, at 25 % opacity. Light (2.4 × 3.2, 18 %) suits a portfolio you want people to enjoy; Dense (1.1 × 1.6, 30 %) suits proofs and previews you do not want used. Watch the crop check as you change it: on a lattice the clean crop usually drops to a few per cent of the frame.
Does a tiled watermark stop people using my photo?
It makes it harder. A lattice cannot be cropped away and is slow to paint out by hand, so casual reuse stops. Somebody determined, with time and retouching tools, can still remove it, and no setting changes that. The honest trade is coverage against intrusion: the denser the lattice, the more it is in the way of the people you wanted to look at the picture.
What angle works best?
Thirty degrees off horizontal is the usual answer and the default here (−30°): steep enough that no horizontal crop or band can avoid it, shallow enough that the wording still reads. Straight rows at 0° look tidier and line up, and anything that lines up is easier to average away.