Anyone else tried out the new watermarking feature? I have and here is what I think so far…crap.

Now allow me to be constructive.

I use a PNG for my watermark to keep it nice looking and transparent, when I do this through Photoshop CS4. It comes out looking professional and great. Lightroom previews the watermark as I would expect it to look, with the same professional appearance. When it’s applied however, the PNG is made darker and more opaque. I thought it was my export settings for the final image, but alas no matter what I try, it looks pretty horrific, in my opinion.

Now onto the interface because that thing feels like an after thought.To get to that interface, right-click on an image and choose “Export”, then down at the bottom of the Settings panel, tick “Watermark” and select “Edit Watermark” from the dropdown list. I’ve inlcuded a zip file of my example files so you can see what I’m referring to.

In my testing I took a stock image (not mine) and slapped my watermark on it. The dropdown list at the top actually functions as the “Save As” for new watermark presets and “Save” for updating existing ones (see menu1.jpg in the attached ZIP).

It also changes to [Presetname] (edited) when you have unsaved changes, just to confuse things even more. Adding an image or text is intuitive enough and you can see from wm1.jpg that my watermark appears as white-transluscent text with a dark outline.

However, when I saved that as a jpg with 100% quality (it happens no matter what is selected) the outcome doesn’t look like the preview at all, you can see this in wm2.jpg.

For comparison, I created wm3.jpg to show the results I get when using Photoshop to do the same operation.

I really love the idea of having this functionality within LR, but if the dev team needs to rework that interface, but more importantly than that, make it produce what it previews. I’ve included how I would redo the interface while keeping it a modal dialog.

–Peter