Add a logo to a photo

The main stage assumes you want the element in the middle at whatever size it arrived — reasonable for a sticker, wrong for a mark. A logo is nearly always small, nearly always in a corner, and nearly always needs to survive being cropped by software that never asked you. So this version of the same tool starts with those three decisions already made and lets you undo any of them.

Concretely: the mark lands at eighteen per cent of the photograph's long edge, its centre held inside a margin of three per cent of the short edge at the bottom right, the safe-margin guides visible, and the drop shadow off. Everything else about the tool is identical, down to the sixteen mixing modes and the export path.

1. 1Open the photograph. A product shot, a shop front, a signed document — whatever the mark is going onto. It is read in this tab and goes no further.
2. 2Drop the logo file in. A PNG with a see-through background gives you the mark and nothing else. A logo saved as a JPG arrives as a white rectangle, which is worth knowing before you start moving it around.
3. 3Leave it where it lands, or move it. It opens bottom right, inside the margin, at a size that reads without shouting. Both safe-margin guides are on so you can see the band a crop is most likely to take.
4. 4Make it sit on the photo rather than on top of it. Drop the opacity a little, or try Multiply for a dark mark on a light photo and Screen for a light mark on a dark one. An outline separates a mark that is fighting a busy background.
5. 5Save it at the photo's real size. The mark is redrawn from your original file at the size of the finished picture, so a logo that looks crisp in the preview is crisp in the export too.

Opening size

18% of the long edge. Ten to twenty per cent is the band almost every readable mark falls in.

Opening position

Bottom right, centre held three per cent of the short edge in from both sides.

Safe margins

Guides at 3% and 5% of the short edge, on by default here and off by default on the main stage.

Mark files

PNG, WebP and GIF carry a see-through channel. JPG does not, and arrives as a rectangle.

Mixing

Multiply keeps dark ink and drops white. Screen keeps light marks and drops black. Normal keeps whatever the file has.

Signatures

Photograph the signature on white, cut it out, place it on Multiply. The paper disappears and the ink does not.

• A second graphic is a second layer. Add the shop name as its own picture and it gets its own card in the deck, its own position and its own mode; Distribute spaces the two evenly if that is what you want.
• A corner mark is not protection. It reads as a credit and it goes in one crop. If the worry is somebody taking the picture rather than somebody wondering whose it is, you want a repeating mark across the whole frame, which is a different kind of mark from a credit in the corner.
• A vector logo is not read in this release. Export it as a PNG at roughly the size it will appear and the result is identical; rasterising an SVG at placement size is work still ahead of us.

How big should a logo be on a product photo?

Between a tenth and a fifth of the long edge covers almost every case, which is why this page opens at eighteen per cent. Below a tenth it stops being legible the moment a marketplace resizes your picture for a grid; above a fifth it starts competing with the thing you are selling. Size it against the frame rather than in pixels and the same setting lands identically on a 900-pixel web copy and a 6000-pixel original.

Which corner is safest?

Bottom right, and it is not a matter of taste. Feed software crops from the centre outward and from the top for a preview thumbnail, so the bottom corners survive more often than the top ones, and the bottom right is where fewer photographs put their subject. Keep a margin of about three per cent of the short edge and the mark is still inside the frame after a square crop.

My logo is a JPG and it shows up as a white box. What now?

A JPG has no see-through channel at all, so the white the logo was drawn on is genuinely part of the file and there is nothing here to remove it. Two ways out: ask whoever made the logo for the PNG or the vector, or set the element to Multiply, which drops white to nothing and keeps the dark ink. Multiply only works when the photograph underneath is lighter than the mark.

Can I do a folder of two hundred product shots at once?

Not on this page — this one is for placing a mark by eye on one photograph. The logo-on-multiple-photos page takes a whole folder: one mark, placed by a rule stated as shares of each frame, with the ground under the mark measured on every photo and a ZIP at the end.

Will the logo survive somebody cropping the picture?

Partly. A mark in a corner is gone in one drag of a selection box, and nothing set here changes that. What the safe-margin guides do is protect it from the crops that are not deliberate — a square thumbnail, a story frame, a marketplace grid — which is most of them. If somebody actively wants your mark off a picture, a corner placement is not what stops them.

• Put one logo on many photosA folder of photos, one mark, one rule stated as shares of each frame, every photo checked, one ZIP.
• Where a logo should sitSize against the frame, the corner that survives a crop, and the margin to leave.
• Overlay or watermarkA mark you want read against a mark meant to be ignored, and why the tools differ.
• Place something on a photoThe stage and a deck of layers: logos, stickers, textures or a second photo, each moved until it looks right.