Fine Art America

Seems to be a subject that has been addressed many, many times...

Yes and sometimes.

50% are going to say yes and 50% are a no. Your choice, there are good points to consider on both sides.

I'm right then. I fall into the 50% category.

if it doesn't make it sell, and people are confused whether it will be there or not - you leave it off. people will take it either way, and its a snap to clone out.

---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

Do you know there are software can remove watermark?

If you work is only low resolution, you might need the watermark.
however, FAA/Pixels/AW only shows a compressed, lower resolution image for display on the web. It NEVER displays the full resolution file you upload.
Sure, if people see it, they can copy/steal it. But if you don't show it, you can't SELL it, and a watermark by its very nature interferes to with that process to some extent.
Most people prefer to buy from reputable sites, in my opinion, because quality and guarantee of a reputable site are important to them.

No watermarks, people who "steal" most likely aren't going to be buyers. Watermarking is ugly & turns people off.

Let people promote your work if they want too. Real buyers will have an easier time finding you going forward.

TinEye & Google Image Search are becoming increasingly popular. I feel as the technology advances you will want your images as many places as you can get them. Because your name & info will be easily connected to your work no matter where it is online.

If you watermark you are stopping most people from promoting your work. Like I said if someone wants to buy they will. As artists, I feel we should focus more on creating new & better quality work. There are plenty of people who will support good work & pay.

Depends what you mean by stealing.
& yes, some people will buy.

The weekly watermark debate.

I am going to try and stay out of it for once.

Some stats though.

First it is not 50/50. ~30% of images on FAA have watermarks. 70% do not.

Second, approximately 10% of sold images have watermarks. To put that another way, the 70% of images that have no watermarks make 90% of the sales. That is quite the disparity.

Yes, you CAN sell with watermarks but conversely images CAN get taken with them too.

It really boils down to this. If image theft concerns you more than potentially reduced sales revenue then watermark. If you can live with giving away 900 pixel "samples" and in return get an increased chance for sales, then don't.

The human brain is capable of many things, even if it belongs to a lowly image filcher.

They see a pic they like and immediately download it, then their brain goes to work: imagining what it would be like to spend the day in the scene, imagining that there may be a boat on the lake they can go rowing and fishing in, imaging the weather's a bit warmer or cooler, even imagining there's no watermark in the bottom right hand corner - in fact they imagine it so well that it soon completely disappears

"70% of images that have no watermarks make 90% of the sales"

That's enough evidence for me.

Had my work online with no watermarks for many years now. I've had to send two cease and desist letters to websites selling (tiny prints of ) my work illegally. Both places removed the images within a week. I've built a full time living from art sales, much of that online sales.
People who steal are not buyers.

We should just refer this questions to the search on the home page of the threads. There can't possibly be anything new about this topic that has not already been said 1000 times.

So, it follows, then, if I remove all the watermarks, all my work will sell? huh? huh? I wish? any stats on that?

Some are forgetting that a lot of these sites aren't taking images to reprint. They just post images of any paintings they can find and bang out rough approximations in sweat shops after someone puts in the order. I have had my images complete with signature stolen for this purpose. A watermark makes it that much harder and the scammer probably just goes on to the next one.

Another point in favour of watermarks, with rampant pinning and RTing going on 24/7 - it's also great advertising to have your name right on the image (of course that doesn't work with the FAA watermarks - but that would be another oft-discussed topic!)

"A watermark makes it that much harder"

First off a signature is not a water mark unless you try to turn it into one. Then FAA will not print it.

As for making it harder.

I have demonstrated here several times. I can take any image off FAA with or without a watermark, and have a file uploaded that will print in a 16 x 20 or larger in about 20 minutes.

The soft money loss due to a theft of a low resolution image is no worth the hard money loss of sales and efforts to use water marks in the long run.

haha - ok I'm not going to comment about the person who uploads an image to this site with their own watermark on it! Nor about the buyer who thinks the watermark will be on their print!

Floyd you may be a whiz with your software but for every one of you there are probably 100,000 who don't share your talents. And even the PS talented would be hard pressed to justify sitting there cloning decloning or whatever for half an hour when they could have harvested a few dozen or more images with no watermarks in the same amount of time.

Best as I recall, once the watermark is on older work, it cannot be removed.
I just tried it out and confirmed it.

You would have to reupload it.

EDIT image
CHANGE image
Delete old and load up new

Keeps all but the old image and watermark

Thank you!

Just added a couple to one of my old things..........I like it. Looks a lot more professional.

"Second, approximately 10% of sold images have watermarks. To put that another way, the 70% of images that have no watermarks make 90% of the sales. That is quite the disparity. "

I'd like to see the break down by gallery vs. individual artist. My guess is a gallery uploading 40,000 images doesn't really care if there is a watermark. An individual artist might.

The other problem occurs if you wish to license your work. Every stock agency watermarks. Hard to offer a small RF license to a blogger when you give away the small sizes.

"Floyd you may be a whiz with your software"

I am not anywhere near a whiz on my software. I would bet that there are very few in here that if they want to, they could do the same thing. It would maybe take them 15 - 20 minutes to figure it out. That's all it took me the fist time and most of the PhotoShop people in here know 10 times more about PhotoShop and photo editing then I do. I am old and old school. I still believer that less is more when it comes to editing. But that is just me. I am behind the times.

There are 7th and 8th graders, maybe even 5th and 6th graders that know a lot more then I know. But you can bet the people that steal images really are whizzes and those watermarks don't slow them down more then about one minute to get rid of them.

I use 'em. No regrets. I've explained why several times in other threads so I won't repeat myself here.

Consider this: there are dumb people who think that the final print will have a watermark, they don't understand what a watermark is.

You can ONLY see mine if you use the" Like " tab..........yeah. really check it out Luca!

If you really want a watermark you can turn to digimarc. About $79 for the first year
and $99 after that.

I use Digimarc because I was reading someone here in the forum early on strongly endorsed it.

I think it is a totally useless thing to have.

For a goodly variety of reasons I pay the US Copyright office a few times a year to register
my work. This will more than likely prove unnecessary, but I have a very limited number of images
so it is not cost prohibitive. Because I am doing what might be called sampling getting the work registered
adds to the credibility of my ownership concerning only what I have done. Also later in my life or in my estate
ownership should be clear.

Dave

Do NOT call people dumb who are not web savvy. You were in the same position when you first started out. Remember that!

 "Every stock agency watermarks. Hard to offer a small RF license to a blogger when you give away the small sizes."

Not on here they don't. Getty does NOT use watermarks here.

digimarc is a waste of money

first - it adds noise to the image
second - you have to have digimarc in your system to read the thing. so like me - i don't have it in there, it wasn't needed. so no one will know i looked at an image with it on there.
and third - even if you knew someone opened it, you can't do anything because they didn't do anything wrong. and i doubt you would have enough information to use against them anyway. at most you'll get an IP. and this detection only works in photoshop.

and copyrights will only be supported for truly original work.


---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

Remember the old days when your portrait pics came with the word proof on them before you ordered the ones you wanted? How many actually thought their pics would have this on them? My take is watermarks prevent and distract the shoppers eye but I give them more credit than some and believe they know the purpose of a watermark. I chose not to use them and do not spend time being worried about theft.

We have decided to use them 30% of the time and not to use them 70% of the time so that we may sell 90% of our art 100% of the time.
Thanks to all for helping us to decide.

Really though, we will not use them based on what has been posted. Probably will leave the ones intact that we have already used.

Ya, but David, 30% of the time the 70% will have an effect on the 30% where as 70% of the time the 30% will have no effect on the 100%.

Or you could go with Yogi Berra. He thinks that you should go with 75% with and the other 50% without. :-))

Well said Floyd.
You wouldn't be inibreated with the exuberance of your own verbosity, would you? Haha.
Love your humor.