watermark

A watermark does two different jobs and they are worth keeping apart, because the mark you design for one is wrong for the other. A promotional watermark says where to find the creator: it rides on public content and is meant to be read by strangers. A tracing watermark says where this copy came from: it rides on paid content and is meant to be read by you, after the file turns up somewhere it should not be. The first is branding. The second is the only practical tool anyone has against a content leak once the file is out.

What is a watermark for?

Attribution, in both directions.

• On a free or public file, it points traffic back to the account. A teaser that spreads without a handle on it sells nothing.
• On a paid file, it identifies the source. When a leaked file carries a mark, you know which account, and sometimes which buyer, it escaped through.
• On a custom, it does both at once. A custom has one recipient, so any mark on it is effectively a name.

What should a watermark contain?

As little as possible, and always something that resolves to a source.

Mark type	What it carries	What it lets you conclude
Handle	The account name	Where the file came from, readable by anyone
Account code	A short static string	Which account, without advertising it
Per-buyer code	A reference unique to one sale	Which sale the leaked copy left through

Per-buyer marking is the only version that answers the question you actually ask after a leak. A handle tells you what you already knew. A code tied to one purchase tells you which buyer to cut off, which is the difference between noting a leak and stopping the next one. It costs a rendering step per sale, so most teams apply it to high-value files and customs rather than to everything.

Where do you put one without ruining the shot?

Somewhere hard to crop and easy to ignore. Corners are the worst choice: a corner is one crop away from gone. The usable rules are short.

1. Keep it away from the frame edge, roughly over the middle third.
2. Keep the opacity high enough to read and low enough to ignore.
3. On video, move it or repeat it, so a single crop or a static blur does not remove it.
4. Keep the same placement across a catalogue, so you can spot it fast when checking a suspected leak.
5. Never let it cover the part of the image the fan paid to see.

What does a watermark not do?

It does not prevent anything. A mark is forensic, not protective: it survives the copy in order to identify it, and a determined person will crop, blur or re-encode it out. Nor does it recover a file, force a host to remove it, or tell you who reposted it. Only which sale it started from. Treat it as the label on a bottle, not the lid. The rest of the work is access hygiene: who holds credentials, who still has raw files, and which of those people should have been removed at the end of the last job. What every other defence is actually worth is set out in protecting your content.