The crop check explained
This page opens the studio with placement in front: the nine pins on the picture, the crop check on the stage as a dashed rectangle, and the sentence that goes with it — “A crop keeping 71 % of the picture removes this mark”, or for a lattice “No crop larger than 3 % of the picture is free of the mark.” Next to it is the trade-off, the share of the frame the mark covers at all. The two numbers move together as you drag, resize or rotate the mark.
The measurement comes from the renderer’s own pixels. The mark is drawn fully opaque on a small transparent copy of the frame, every pixel it touches is counted as taken, and the largest untouched rectangle is found. Nothing is estimated from a bounding box, so a rotated line of wording leaves the empty corners of its box available, as it would to anybody with a crop tool.
Corners, edges and centre
| Corner | Out of the way; a crop keeps most of the picture. Good for credit, weak for protection. |
|---|---|
| Edge centre | A band crop removes it with less loss than a corner crop would suggest, because the picture's middle survives. |
| Centre | Hard to crop around. In the way of the subject unless it is faint. |
| Repeated | No useful crop survives. The most intrusive option, and the one that stops casual reuse. |
The subject check and its limits
“Check the subject” is optional and stays folded until you open it. Pressed, it downloads a 5.9 MB person-finder model from our model file server the first time — the size is stated on the button, the file is checked against its SHA-256 checksum, and your picture is never part of the request — and ranks the nine points by how much of a person each would cover and how busy the detail underneath is. It moves nothing until you press its suggestion, and that move is one undo step.
- It finds people. It does not know where a product, a pet or a building is, and it says so when it finds nobody.
- Placing the mark well makes a crop harder; it does not make the mark hard to remove.
Checking portrait and square crops
Under the stage, the recipe proof draws the same settings on a landscape, a portrait and a square crop of your own picture. A corner mark sized for a landscape frame often becomes a banner across a tall one; the portrait override gives frames taller than they are wide their own grid point and size, and the proof shows the result before a folder goes through the batch route.
Placement questions
Where should I put a watermark?
Where it costs the picture least and a crop costs the thief most. Those pull in opposite directions: the corners are out of the way and easy to crop off; the middle is hard to crop off and in the way. Open your photo, move the mark across the nine points and watch the crop check — the share of the picture a clean crop would keep — alongside the subject check, which says how much of a person the mark would cover.
Is the corner a bad place?
Not for attribution — a credit in the corner travels with a screenshot and is easy to live with. It is a bad place if stopping reuse is the point: the crop check typically shows a clean crop keeping three-quarters or more of a landscape photo. If that matters, move the mark inward, make it larger, or repeat it.
What is the crop check measuring?
The largest rectangle, in the picture's own proportions, that contains no part of the mark — found from the pixels the renderer actually draws, so a rotated mark, a plate or a lattice all count exactly as they land. It is reported as a share of the picture's area. It measures cropping only; it says nothing about retouching or AI fill.