Lose watermark quality when saving for web in Photoshop CS6

Question

So I have applied a watermark to my image which is originally 1.37MB in size.

I usually go to File > Save for web to reduce the size of the image appropriately as the image will be used for a website.

The problem I'm having is when I reduce the quality down to 39 (JPEG) the quality of the watermark drastically reduces. I don't mind the image losing quality as it's not so obvious whereas any text / watermark is very easy to spot when it loses its quality as it gets pixelated.

Any ideas on how I can keep the image size at maximum 80KB and keep the quality of the watermark?

Answer 1

As already commented, its quality isn't especially bad. You can make the watermark subjectively sharper by making it bigger.

Reducing image pixel dimensions can be useful. It allows less compression to be enough for the wanted file size.

3rd possiblity: Have highly compressed photo, but add the watermark as programmed overlay in the web site code. Then the watermark can be less compressed, even a vector image. Unfortunately I'm not a programmer and cannot show a code example.

Big size watermark has another advantage: It's more difficult to remove. Just now it's quite easily removed. See it yourself:

Difficult to remove watermark covers some details which cannot be copied from the same image elsewhere. Often the watemark is many small logos all around the image for the same reason.

BTW. This probably is not an image intended to be published (gaffa tapes, carpet not perfectly straight)

Answer 2

You can try to save it as an SVG file (this is a very good method to save graphics that are made from shapes in the original quality, with small file size), or make the watermark bigger.