How to remove a logo or date stamp from your own photo, free and without uploading it

This is for pictures that are yours to edit: product photos carrying the logo from a shop you have renamed, family prints with a camera's orange date in the corner, a supplier's photo you are licensed to use that came with their stamp on it. If the watermark belongs to a photographer or a stock library, the answer is to license the picture, not to remove the mark — more on that in the removers compared.

What kind of mark do you have?

The kind of mark decides how you select it and how well it will come out:

• A logo in a corner. The easiest job. There is usually plenty of clean picture around it to copy from.
• A camera date stamp. Small, a single bright colour, often orange or red. Pick by colour catches every digit at once.
• A line of text or a shop name. Separate letters, one colour: Pick by colour with "every matching pixel" ticked.
• A semi-transparent mark over the middle of the photo. Harder, because what is behind it is detail rather than background. Expect a second pass.
• A pattern tiled across the whole picture. Not removable this way, because there is no clean area to rebuild from. The tool refuses when the mark covers more than 40% of the picture.

How do you remove a logo from a photo, step by step?

Step 1: Open the photo in the remover

Go to the Makerfern logo and watermark remover and drop the photo onto it, paste it, or choose it. PNG, JPG and WEBP all work. Pictures larger than 4,096 pixels on the long side are scaled to that size. If you want to see a finished result first, press Try the sample image: it arrives with its logo already marked and removed.

Step 2: Mark the logo

Choose how to mark it:

• Brush — paint over the mark. Cover it completely, plus a little of the background around it. The [ and ] keys change the brush size.
• Box — drag a rectangle over a logo that sits in a clear rectangle of its own.
• Pick by colour — click the mark and every connected pixel of that colour is selected. Tick "every matching pixel in the picture" for text, so separate letters are caught together. If you click the background by mistake, the tool refuses rather than marking half the photo.
• Unmark — takes some of the marking back. Undo (or Ctrl+Z) steps back one stroke.

Step 3: Choose the fill

Copy texture finds the parts of your photo that look most like the area around the mark and copies them in, working from a blurred version up to full detail. It is the right choice for anything with a pattern: grass, fabric, wood grain, brick, gravel, a knitted surface.

Smooth blend fills the area with the smoothest colours that meet its edges. It suits sky, painted walls, gradients and studio backdrops, where copied texture would add grain that was never there.

Step 4: Remove it and compare

Press Remove the marked area. A logo takes about a second on an ordinary laptop. Switch between Result and Original above the picture to compare. Everything outside your marking is returned exactly as it was.

Step 5: Save

Download as PNG to keep the quality (and any transparency), or JPG for a smaller file. Both are free. If you have a folder of photos with the same logo in the same place, Pro applies your marks to every one of them and hands back a zip.

Why is there a faint outline where the logo was?

Almost every logo has a soft edge, a glow or a drop shadow that spreads a pixel or two beyond what you notice. If your marking stops at the visible edge, that halo stays and the fill copies around it. Raise Widen the mark by two or three pixels, paint over the ghost, and run it again. Each run works on the result of the last one.

Why does the fill look smeared or repeated?

• Smeared: you used Smooth blend on something textured. Undo, switch to Copy texture, run again.
• A visible repeat: the fill copied the same small patch several times because there was little similar texture nearby. Mark a smaller area at a time, starting from the edges of the logo.
• A straight line breaks in the middle: a fence rail, a shelf edge or a horizon crossing the mark. Mark the logo in two parts, one on each side of the line, so each fill has the line at its edge to continue.
• Something that was under the logo is missing: a patch fill cannot know it was there. If it matters, retake or reshoot; no honest tool can recover detail it never saw.

Can you remove a date stamp from a scanned print?

Yes, and it is one of the jobs this does best. Scan at a decent resolution, then use Pick by colour and click one of the digits: camera dates are usually a single saturated orange or red, so a tolerance around 40 catches the whole stamp without touching the photo. Widen the mark by two pixels to cover the soft glow printed around the digits, then use Copy texture. If the date sits over sky, Smooth blend is often cleaner.

What should you do with the photo next?

• Selling it? Check it is big enough for the size you will print or list with the print size checker.
• Need the product on its own? The background remover clears a plain backdrop to transparent.
• Updating old listings? The guide to getting your product photos back covers downloading every picture from a listing page at once.

Sources

• How the fill works: Barnes et al., “PatchMatch”, SIGGRAPH 2009, and Wexler, Shechtman and Irani, “Space-Time Completion of Video”, IEEE PAMI 2007 — the multi-scale patch method the remover implements.
• The 40% refusal, the 4,096-pixel limit and the default settings are from the remover's own code, checked 21 September 2026.
• On whose watermarks you may remove: 17 U.S.C. § 1202, Cornell LII, accessed 21 September 2026.

Everything linked here is free to use, runs in your browser, and needs no account. If something in this post is wrong or out of date, it is worth telling us — the date at the top is the last time it was checked.