dsmeltz Loc: Philadelphia

No. A watermark is just an edit to your image that contains ... well whatever you want. A copyright is a legal set of ownership rights that can best be protected by filing with the US Copyright Office (in the USA, or whatever it is called if you live else where). You can use a watermark to display a copyright notice in your image that does to some extent help you to say to a violator, "Hey you knew it was protected when you stole it." But the watermark is not the legal protection. That comes in two parts. 1) you have a copyright the instant you release the shutter, 2) you register the copyright before the photo is misused. Registering after violation reduces what you can get in court.

Here is a great resource;

http://thecopyrightzone.com/

If you have registered the copyright your image is protected whether you put a watermark in the photo or not.

SuperflyTNT Loc: Manassas VA

In Lightroom you never change the raw copy so it’s always saved.

jerseymike

Great. Thank you.

amfoto1 Loc: San Jose, Calif. USA

That's simply not true.

You can turn the watermarks on or off in Lightroom. Or if you have some different ones set up, you can switch to between watermarks. The place to do all this is right there in the Export dialogue box. I don't see how it could be easier.

One of the nice things about LR is that it can scale watermarks to different size images, as needed.

LR also only watermarks Exported conversion files. If the image is instead "sent" to another image editor, such as Photoshop, that's not watermarked.

EDIT: A watermark is one form of "copyright protection". Deliberately removing it from someone's image without their permission can result in a fine up to $30,000 U.S. per instance.

Bfree2 Loc: Grants Pass, Or

There’s an option to not have the cloud?

via the lens Loc: Northern California, near Yosemite NP

If you go to the Adobe website it will explain all of the options you get for the subscription package. And, on my Mac, there is an actual cloud icon at the top and it also explains the options. There is a desktop version of LR called Lightroom Classic. Then there is a cloud-based version, their words, called simply Lightroom. (Yes, why make it easy for us to understand the differences, keep us guessing!). You also get Photoshop with the package. And, you also get cloud storage, which does not mean you have to use the cloud version, you could just send images from your desktop version to the cloud for storage. It's all somewhat confusing and perhaps they like it that way, but once figured out it works out fine. I only use the desktop version, the Classic Lightroom, and I do not currently store any work in the cloud, even thought that storage if part of the program I pay for. Read the Adobe site and other articles on this topic to fully understand. I believe the cloud version is somewhat less of a program and works a bit differently than the Classic version, at least based on what I've read.