Thread: How to remove watermark from an image or picture

A watermark is any recognizable text, logo or pattern that appears over an image to identify the owner of the image and generally used to prevent unauthorized reuse of the image. Watermarks are usually transparent and can be difficult to remove. The difficulty or ease of removal depends on the content of the image and the position, color, size etc of the watermark.

There are several resources out there that teaches you how to remove watermark from pictures, but most of them are old. Although these guides are still relevant and teaches the basics, in light of some new tools available in the hands of users I decided a new guide was necessary. Hence this tutorial.

Removing water mark using Photoshop CS5
The new iteration of Photoshop, Creative Suite 5 or CS5 in short, includes some handy tools that really helps in such tasks as removing watermarks. It’s called Content Aware Fill.

For our example we will use an image from iStockPhoto and try to remove the watermark right across the face of the image.



Open the image in Photoshop CS5, and select the “Spot Healing Brush Tool” from the toolbar. You can also press J to select it.





Press [ or ] to increase or decrease the size of the brush as required, and carefully run it over the watermark.



Release it, and the line is gone.



If the result is unsatisfactory, undo it or go back in History and repeat. Use the smallest brush size as possible to get good results.

For larger areas we will use the lasso tool. Select the watermark to remove using the Lasso Tool (L). Notice that I selected only a part of the watermark. This is because the image behind the watermark is not uniform. To get the best results work with small areas of the watermark having identical backgrounds. In this example, I marked the watermark till the edge of the horn of the skull.



Now press D. Make sure “Content Aware” is selected under “Use” and press OK




Remember, you can always undo and repeat the steps. Here is the final result with the complete watermark removed. Not perfect but passable.



Source:How to remove watermark from an image or picture - Instant Fundas

Thanks for this looks like watermarks are not sufficient now :P.
But this thing might just not work for the dark watermarks, right?
We might just need to crop them out....

But its Nice Tutorial Ra.1 :)

I havent even think about this. Thanks for this tutorial. This is really gonna help me with some old pics :)

Members please do not rep tutorials that are grabbed elsewhere. It takes two seconds to copy/paste a tutorial from another site. It is not a good reason to gain rep. Rep is supposed to signify how active and trustworthy a member is, and a copy/paste job indicates neither.

good tutorial I have copied it to my photoshop tutorials folder. I would have never thought about doing that. Thanks again for serching the internet to find it and posting it here.

Cheers

This will also work on dark watermarks, it doesn't matter what it is you're trying to remove, the program will see whatever you mark as a "flaw" and try to blend it with the surrounding area.

Other options that work equally well are the Cloning Brush in paint programs. It lets you mimic what you see in one area and move it to another covering over the watermark or whatever you want to hide.

There's also 2 programs that I know of that can work remarkably well removing watermarks, even entire objects, Image Mender and InPaint. If you ever visit the site Giveaway of the Day, they sometimes offer both of these programs for free.

Depending on the original image, you might find one method or program works better than the other, but all of the methods mentioned are worth a try when you're trying to salvage an image.