As an event photographer and wedding photographer based in London, when my clients purchase the digital archive of their shoot I include a set of low resolution images with a discrete corner watermark for them to post on social media if they’d like. Initially I was using Lightroom to resize and watermark these images, but quickly noticed that Lightroom does a reeeally bad job of resizing the watermark, which is nowhere near sharp.
It seems like Lightroom applies the watermark to the full size image, then resizes everything. The photo looks okay, but the watermark is soft. I don’t see why Lightroom would do it this way, and after digging around the web I could only find this workaround, which apparently does the trick but it’s a lot of faff for something that should be simple.
As it happens I also own Blogstomp for creating my blog collages and it absolutely nails this very simple task. Simply create a preset with the ‘Longest Edge’ setting at whatever pixel dimension you’re going for, set up the watermark where you want it, adjust the sharpening preset to taste, load in all the images you want to resize, and use the Batch tool to pump them all out resized to your chosen dimension with a pin-sharp watermark. I just ran it on a full shoot of 413 images with no problems at all.
So stick with Lightroom for your edits, but for your watermarks get yourself Blogstomp for just $49 and be happy.
N.B. The Batch tool pumps out the watermark in the same place on all the photos so if some need it in a different location you’ll need to create a different preset and batch those images separately. But it’s worth it.
