Three pieces
Everything we wrote down while building this
The stage takes about twenty seconds to use and rather longer to explain. These are the three explanations that kept coming up while it was being built — the sort of thing you would otherwise learn by saving a picture, looking at it the next morning and wishing you had done it differently.
None of them need you to have the tool open, and none of them are a manual. They are about the decisions that survive whatever software you use: how big, how far in, how much of it you want showing, and whether the job you are doing is the job this page is for.
- Where a logo should sit on a photographWhy a tenth to a fifth of the long edge is the band that reads everywhere, and why the bottom right corner outlives the other three.7 min
- What the blend modes actually do to a photographFour of the sixteen carry almost every picture. Here is the arithmetic each one performs, in words, and what leaves Normal and the other eleven for the awkward cases.9 min
- Overlay or watermark: telling the two jobs apartOne question — do you want the mark looked at, or ignored — decides which tool you should be using, and sometimes the answer is not this one.6 min
Read them in this order if you are reading them all
Placement first, because it is the one that changes what you do in the next five minutes: a size expressed as a share of the frame and a corner chosen for the crops you cannot predict. Modes second, because the moment a mark looks wrong on a picture the instinct is to shrink it, and usually the fix is Multiply or an outline instead. The third piece is the one to read if you are about to do this to more than about ten files, since it will probably tell you to go somewhere else.
What is deliberately not written here
There is nothing about repeating a mark across a frame, nothing about running a folder through a queue, and nothing about cutting a subject away from its background. Not because those are unimportant — they are the three things people most often want next — but because this page does none of them, and a guide to a feature you cannot reach from the page it is printed on is advertising with footnotes.
Where a piece here needs one of those, it says so in a sentence and names the tool that does it. That is as far as the pointing goes.
Back to the working end
- Place something on a photoThe stage and a deck of layers: logos, stickers, textures or a second photo, each moved until it looks right.
- Add a logo to a photoOpens small, in the corner, inside the margin a crop is least likely to take.
- AboutWho builds this and the one thing it deliberately will not do.