The work aims to propose a new adaptive image watermarking algorithm based on relationship in lifting wavelet transform (LWT) domain in order to improve the imperceptibility and the ability against attacks of watermarked image. Firstly, the watermarking signal was preprocessed to enhance its security, and then the carrier image was divided into non-overlapping blocks and the 2-level LWT was performed on each block. Secondly, according to the selected threshold, the absolute difference value of the selected coefficients, and the brightness and texture masking of each block, the watermarking signal was embedded by adaptively adjust their relationship of the selected coefficients. Finally, the watermarked image was obtained by LWT. In the watermarking extraction, the original carrier image was not required. A lot of simulation experiments showed that the proposed algorithm had better imperceptibility and it also had a strong robustness against conventional signal processing and part of Adobe Photoshop CS6 software processing. Compared with similar watermarking technologies, the proposed algorithm had a better capability against attacks. The proposed algorithm can meet the needs of application of image copyright protection.