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removing watermark... for a good cause


diamante67

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Long time no see... I have a rather unusual question to ask. I have lost all my pictures (as well as my house etc) in the fires in North California. Just before the fires, I had taken pictures of my neighbor's extended family (parents were visiting from India, brother and family was visiting from Australia so you can imagine it was a rare and special occasion). I had just delivered the prints and files to her when the fires happened. Moral of the story, all the pictures are gone. I am only left with the unedited, low res files that I had uploaded to the gallery for her to pick the images. I told her that all the images are gone and she is at peace with that but, now that my life is slightly less chaotic, I was wondering if I could remove the watermark on some of them, so that at least she can have some memories of her family's visit. Would there be a "smart" way to remove the watermark? See attached sample.

Moral of the story - now that my backup hard drives went in flames, backup on the cloud sounds pretty darn appealing :( 

34753317353_f5fb6a8b00_o.jpg

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I am... I thought I had posted my reply and assumed you were too busy to respond. It turns out the draft I wrote did not get posted :( Here you go...

 

 If I remember correctly it was done through the watermark feature in Lightroom (LR 5?). You will be pleased to hear that, now that I got my new computer, I finally had the guts to only reinstall PS ;) Nothing like a fire to get rid of bad habits? :)

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Actually I went ahead and downloaded it and it looks very very close but the spacing seems off a bit, and not in a predictable way. Not sure whether LR maybe was spacing the letters a tiny bit differently to cover all the surface?

 

screenshot.PNG

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Oh, that's really interesting - I can see how it would work if I could get 100% overlap. Well, I will try to play a bit more with it. I wonder if trying to superimpose the watermark in black in LR might take care of the alignment issue. Long shot, I know. Otherwise I could try and use it selectively (letter by letter?) on the areas that are tougher to clone, such as the dress pattern. Might be more work than I was hoping to do - we'll see. Thank a lot for the idea! If I make it to get a decent result I will post it.

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I finally managed to install LR last night and I played a bit with it but have not been able to line up the watermark. I do have visibility of the settings and I can see if I can set up the font with the same additional shadow in PS. unfortunately life is completely crazy and I have no prediction about when I can spend some time to figure it out... on the positive side, we now have a bed to sleep in :)

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I just thought I would share my unsuccessful attempt. In lightroom, I could not quite get the size to line up and, in any case, it seemed that I could not get the black watermark to erase the white watermark. In photoshop, I could in some spots get a good level of removal, but again the pixels even in the best case would not line up perfectly. And in some spots I could not line up the text properly. I am attaching the picture of the half-baked photoshop results. I guess I will resign myself and give her the watermarked pictures :(

 

 

watermark.jpg

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I might try, but definitely can't do that for so many pictures (at least 30). and given how slowly I am moving, it will take me forever :)

Now I am glad I posted because I had given up but I think I should try and save a few.

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Before you start cloning, you should select the text layer, and go to Layer>Rasterize>Type.

This will essentially turn the layer into a dodge-and-burn layer.  Then you can paint with a small black or white brush to correct some of the misaligned edges of the type.

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