Shutterstock protects its comp previews with two layers at once. First, a bold “shutterstock” wordmark sits across the middle of the image, often with a small link line beneath it. Second — and this is the clever part — a faint, semi-transparent grid of the logo is tiled across the entire frame. The grid is what stops you cropping the comp down to a clean corner: wherever you cut, a piece of the pattern comes with it.
That two-layer design is exactly why brushing works better than a one-click pass here. You paint the heavy central mark in a single stroke, then sweep the brush across the tiled grid region by region. On the uniform parts of a photo — a studio backdrop, sky, a gradient — the grid lifts away almost invisibly, because the AI has plenty of clean surrounding pixels to predict from.
A comp is a sample for layout evaluation, not a licensed asset. Shutterstock’s terms permit comps for internal mock-ups and tests only; the moment an image goes into something published or commercial, you need the licensed download. Removing the mark does not change that — it recovers the picture, not the rights.