Watermark Workflow

Since stock RawTherapee can’t do text/logo watermarks, I use XNViewMP to add a text ‘signature’ after exporting from RawTherapee. How do other people here handle this?

In particular, how do you handle the “jpegs get degraded when edited” problem? Do you export from RT in some other format before adding the watermark, then convert to jpeg? Do you just accept the degradation? Is there some special trick you use?

I personally don’t use watermarks but one such way you can add these watermarks to avoid degrading the image would be to use the external editor function of RT to open the file into a raster editor as a 16bit tiff. Add the watermark as a new layer then save the file. You can now find that tiff with RT and export from there as a jpeg.

If you are on windows or mac a program like photoshop or affinity can actually save the layers in the tiff for later tweaking. In gimp I think you need a external script to save layered tiffs. As far as I know gimp does not support the layered tiffs natively or you can just save a extra xcf as well.

Some time ago, I did that to add text with name and exif:date taken.

  • Once processed to taste, I exported photos from RT in tif(I don’t rememember the parameters but it was at least 16bits).
  • for a batch of processed photo , in xnviewMP batch convert (add text and export in jpeg). You can also include an image as watermark
  • Then delete the tif.
    Be careful with the size of tif ,so limit the number of photos in a batch.

Perhaps Geekie or digikam can do that, but I don’t use them.