Watermarking Tutorial

[Douglas Mitchell]

Since we're on the subject of reducing photo theft, I thought that someone could post a tutorial on this thread on how to watermark your pictures, this is perhaps the best way of prevent plaguarism. I don't know how to do it myself, but I know a few of you out there do.

 

[Melissa Moon]

It's really easy to do on Adobe Photoshop...

So, you have your picture open. Be sure your layer window is also open cause it will make things easier (go to Window and be sure that "Layer" is checked).

Select the insert text tool from the main toolbar (it's a "T") and select the area where you would like to insert the text Once you've selected the area, go ahead and type whatever it is you would like to type, and change the font color to a color that contrasts your image (white is always a good option..you can also set it to your desired color before you even begin typing which is easier).

Once you've got your white text on the picture and you are happy with it, select that layer of text (the text is layered over your picture) on the layer toolbar and right click. From there a little menu will pop up...chose "blending options".

Then a new thing will pop up where you can edit how the text is blended with the picture. Under "General Blending" you'll see a thing where you can change the opacity of the text. Set it to about 30% (or whatever other value you fancy). This will make it so you can see through 70% of the white text which is essentially a watermark. If you want to make it look fanct, like adding a bevel or some kind of shadow, there are also options for that in this same toolbar on the lefthand side.

I don't know how good those instructions were. It takes less than a minute to waterpark a picture using that procedure once you figure out what you're doing. Here's a finished product of a watermark using that procedure:

I'm sure there's an actual watermark tool on photoshop or something that's even easier, but this method works fine for me.

 

[John Diel]

As an added extra to Melissa's, when you do this, try to create an "Action" for these steps. It's great help when doing large numbers of photos. Just one click and it's done as opposed to 5 or 6 steps for each photo.

Here's a link to one such action that will help out quite a bit.

http://www.shutterfreaks.com/Actions/Water...structions.html

 

[Blake Michaleski]

Gayla Drummond has posted her technique several times on various thread so take a look! Very simple and effective. :wink:

 

[John Gnuechtel]

If you don't want to put something physically into your image like a visible watermark, you can always edit the metadata. Photo editing software usually has a way to do this (which can be burried such that people can't edit it I believe). Even though some forms of metadata are very easily edited, people generally don't think to look there, but it's a perfectly enforceable statement of copyright.

 

[Glen Romine]

I haven't tried this myself yet - but the tutorial looks strightforward enough, and seems to offer an invisible watermark that could be even better than using a visible copyright as the offender may not even know to try and remove it.

http://www.tutorialoutpost.com/count/2013

Glen

 

[Court Hubbard]

Here's another straight forward tutorial to watermark your images. Although my photographs are not nearly as stellar as some of the others here, I too am going to watermark every image that I post from now on, just to be on the safe side.

http://www.good-tutorials.com/track/9137

 

[Kevin Bowman]

there is a real quick way

just go to the little text edit part of your program and type into it. yes its not as fancy as otherway but has the same effect

 

[Tim Johnson]

I haven't tried this myself yet - but the tutorial looks strightforward enough, and seems to offer an invisible watermark that could be even better than using a visible copyright as the offender may not even know to try and remove it.

http://www.tutorialoutpost.com/count/2013

Glen

WOW, I really like this stealthy approach. You could include the typical low res watermark on the bottom or top somewhere, and when the ripper crops it out, you still have your hidden watermark whilest they are not the wiser.

Could just see the look on their face when reveal it to them :shock:


I'm gonna try this one....thanks for posting Glen!

 

[Tony Laubach]

I haven't tried this myself yet - but the tutorial looks strightforward enough, and seems to offer an invisible watermark that could be even better than using a visible copyright as the offender may not even know to try and remove it.

http://www.tutorialoutpost.com/count/2013

Glen

It's a pain in the arse, but it does work! Some images have better luck with it that others, and you will have to fool with the text color to get it to work right. On one of my lightning shots, I actually used a very light green against the nearly black background to make it work.

While this is a good idea, it's a bit time consuming to do all my images (I have over 500 now). I will stick with a stamp program to deal with watermarking if I chose to go that route. I usually copyright my work at the end of the season anyway, so if I should need to take any action, I have most of my stuff registered.

To me, its not a huge issue... if I find it someplace and its just being posted, I may ask for credit... otherwise, I'm pretty open. Now if someone was claming mine as theres are using them commerically, then I would step in.

 

[Tim Johnson]

Photoshop does have a history action thingy that can make the process fairly painless I believe.

The only problem would be having to change the color for different photo's I think. I'm sure the action feature used with a few variant watermakrs would make it a bit less burdensome.

 

[Bill Tabor]

Hey kids I use Faststone Photo Resizer which is free donation based ( I sent them $15 Paypal cause I loved it). It basically will convert, resize and apply watermarks (text and graphic) in batch mode so you can operate on entire directories of pictures rather than just one at a time. For best quality use .tif input and output to .jpg for web display. I recommend it:

http://www.faststone.org/FSResizerDetail.htm

 

[Steve Miller TX]

Hey kids I use Faststone Photo Resizerhttp://www.faststone.org/FSResizerDetail.htm

Wow! What a killer app! I just downloaded it and like it better than my Canon utilities which came with my Rebel XT. It doesn't handle (yet) the latest Canon *.CR2 raw files, but does handle the previous *.CRW ones as well as the Nikon raw files. It doesn't hog memory or slow your system down and works/responds quickly. This is a very powerful program and definitely one of the best ones I've seen out there...and for the price it is absoltely the best in my opinion. I'm making a PayPal donation myself....great program. Thanks Bill for passing this along!