Text tool in Photolab

A text tool should allow:

  • placing text within an area rather than a text line
  • word wrapping within the text area
  • bold, italics and underline text
  • different fonts and sizes
  • control of alignment and spacing between lines
  • multiple instances in same image
  • block rotation and scaling

IMO, this goes far outside the remit of a photo editing tool, especially one for processing RAW files. It is definitely more something you would expect from a pixel editing app

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Hi Joanna,

This is what the watermark tool should have been in my opinion. Once demosaicking and denoising is done, the rest is pixel editing territory. True, adding text can be done using an external editor application.

DxO’ Photolab’s cousin, Snapseed, handles RAW files demosaicking and text overlays over multiple lines.

I found similar requests in the forum:




These already exist, unless you want to rotate by angles other than 90Âş multiples.

I think I agree mostly with @Joanna. Specifying a “text area” instead of a single line is getting quite complex.

I would, of course, like the ability to add multiple of the same type of watermark because that is something that cannot be accomplished with the existing tools. You can, however, render a block of text at a 30Âş angle with spacing as you like using another tool and use the graphic watermark to apply it.

I did a little research to see what the competition does.

Lightroom Classic lets you do pretty much the same but only text or graphic and you can’t see it on each photo before export. (You can see it on the current photo while editing the watermark details.)

Luminar has no support for watermarks at all, but you can effect a graphic one using its layering functionality, and this of course means you can have as many as you like.

ON1 has only support for a single graphic watermark on export.

So, from that crop of applications, PhotoLab is already the most flexible.

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So maybe the post should not be called “Text tool” but maybe “more option for Watermarking” :grin:
Thanks for summarising all the Watermark wishes :+1:t3:

Yes, I meant rotation by an arbitrary angle, with mixed typeface attributes.

I come to DxO PL from Picture Window Pro 8, and it handles text very comprehensively. Refer to text transformation, page 222.

PWP8 includes macros to extract file properties and exif data to build the text block, such as: camera model, f stop, shutter speed, focal length, ISO, description…

A text block can be warped or rotated and overlaid over the image.

I find that the Watermark tool as it is currently allows enough possibilities to satisfy the majority of user demands.
If you want a particular text with a particular formatting and with an angle of 28.3 °, then you are a pro and you have the third-party tools for it! Just make it a png and PL4 will be happy to display it on your images …
I’d rather see the engineers at DxO - who did a good job on the watermark - spend time on other requests.

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I do agree.
But we need a way to embed the watermark without being scaled with the picture, and also be able to set a pixel precise position.
A bit more work need to be done before closing the watermark topic.

I agree that image quality is the top priority !

The need for a text tool remains. Agreeing with you that watermarking is an important subset of text blocks.

That’s a good point, and an area I’ve found many applications make confusing. There should be an option for “fixed” or “relative” sizing.

I personally prefer the relative sizing and I can create several variations of this for things like “small blog image” versus “large Flickr image” where the blog version will be relatively larger and more prominent. But the smaller your output the more important it is to be able to be pixel perfect with a graphic watermark.

That said… I’d love the existing functionality to be improved on scaling! (Mentioned elsewhere.)

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I agree the need for a text tool remains. I came from Bibble Pro which had a simple and competent (maybe too simple for your wishes) text overlay tool. I found it much easier to integrate into my workflow than futzing about with imageMagick.

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