How to Remove Watermarks from Stock Photos Using AI (Flux Tools Tutorial)

I just made the BIGGEST trade of my life: a $1 MILLION short position in GettyImages, Adobe Stock, and the ENTIRE stock photo industry. Here’s why…

A couple months ago, I started an AI-focused consulting business (need help getting business value out of your AI systems? Contact us: www.exafloplabs.com). We used a ton of stock imagery, but paying for it all was expensiveee. So when Black Forest Labs released Flux Tools a few days ago, I got an idea…

“What if I erase the watermarks and use the Flux Tools’ inpainting model to fill in the gaps?”

Long story short, it worked perfectly — and in this tutorial, I’ll show you exactly how.

NOTE: I don't condone removing watermarks from images for commercial use - that is illegal.

Step 1:

Set up a ComfyUI server and download the Fill (Inpainting) model example. Download the image and drag it into your ComfyUI setup. Make sure you have flux1-fill-dev.safetensors downloaded into your ComfyUI setup.

Step 2:

Download some stock photos to test on — I used Shutterstock and Adobe Stock here.

Step 3:

Upload the image into the “Load Image” node, right click, then choose “Open in MaskEditor”. Mask out all of the watermarks on the image, then press “Save node”.

Step 4:

Add an “Image Comparer (rgthree)” node to compare the before and after images together, then press “Queue” to run the pipeline.

You’ll notice we didn’t have to input any special prompt in the “Clip Text Encode” node, and we used a simple TEMPLATE workflow that worked out-of-the-box. The results are incredible.

My co-founder and I productionized this workflow so you can try it out for free with your own stock photos at: www.watermarkfix.com

BTW! If you're a business looking for help getting tangible value out of (or need help building) production AI systems, my co-founder and I could love to talk. Feel free to reach out: www.exafloplabs.com

If this is where we are today, things don’t look good for the stock photo industry.

Over the next couple years, I can’t see how it survives: I expect to see $7 BILLION of shareholder value get wiped out.

Startups like Midjourney, Dall-E, and open-source projects like Stable Diffusion allow you to create your own images on-demand, and solutions like the one we built here will continue to proliferate.

…and I know what you’re thinking — you’re right. I didn’t actually short $1M, but I would if I had the money 🙃.