A good friend sent me an image of a book she saw at a local store. The book featured pages filled with cute Adobe Stock images of children. How did I know they were from Adobe Stock? The book’s designer forgot to remove the Adobe Stock watermark! Here’s how to avoid this costly and embarrassing mistake.

Try before you buy

A great feature of Adobe Stock is how it’s integrated with Adobe’s Creative Cloud applications —  Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator. You can download a watermarked preview of an image and place it in your layout. Once everything looks good, you simply license the image from inside your Adobe program and the watermark is automatically removed.

How to license an Adobe Stock image

Search for an image: Type a few keywords to search for an image. Click the cloud icon to download a preview of the image to your library.

Image appears in your Library: Working inside your Adobe application —  for this example, I’m using Photoshop — the image will appear in your library. You can either open the image or simply drag and drop it onto a document. It will appear as a smart object.

Editing the image: The image appears as a smart object. You can apply smart filters and edit the image. The watermark will still appear.

Licensing the image BUT keeping the changes: Right click on the image layer and select License Image. You are guided through the steps to purchase a license for the image.

The image is licensed and the watermark is removed: Changes you made will be applied to the image.

How easy was that! Graphic and layout designers for years loved how easy it is to use Adobe Stock images. Now think how we photographers can use this. Imagine browsing the Adobe Stock collection for ideas for upcoming shoots or add elements to your own image.