Hey y'all! I've been seeing some talk here about watermarking content and best practices, so I wanted to share a PSA about how easy it is for someone to remove watermarks from your images. This isn't to say that you shouldn't watermark your content, but if you are worried about it being stolen there are some simple tricks you can do to improve your watermark for theft protection.

So, there is a tool in Photoshop called the [Spot Healing Brush](https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/how-to/spot-healing-brush-tool.html) that can remove "blemishes" in one click or swipe of the mouse. To demonstrate how this tool can be used to remove watermarks I created some examples based on two types of watermarks I often see (I'm using an open-source image as an example): https://i.imgur.com/kAM42if.jpg

As you can see, the tool easily and convincingly removes watermarks that only cover the skin, but it has a lot more trouble when it has to cover up two different textures at once (see blurry smear on the cat in the final example). This is why watermarks that overlap your body and your background are ideal. If you have a big chunk of your ass missing or blurred after someone tried to remove an overlapping watermark, your watermark did pretty well.

Removing watermarks from gifs and videos is much, much more difficult if they are placed correctly. There are AI tools in some video editing software that can attempt to remove them, but it's time consuming with pretty iffy results.

All this said, if someone truly wants to remove your watermark and they have the expertise, they will be able to even if your watermark looks like this: https://imageframer.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/imageframer_article_watermark_title_image.jpg