Adding Water marks to photos

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Adding Water marks to photos

Postby Chads93GT » Jan 15, 2009 5:34 pm

Guys, I have been taking tons of photos lately and some get posted and I am worried about copyright infringement by shady entities. How do you water mark photos, so someone can't steal your photo and say its one they took? I did a search for water mark and came up with 1 post that had nothing to do with photography, I guess this issue has never been covered before? Thanks. I have adobe Elements 2.0 that i use.
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Re: Adding Water marks to photos

Postby wyandottecaver » Jan 15, 2009 5:39 pm

send all your pictures to me in high resolution. I will watermark them for you.

Shady Entity.

Actually I use Photoshop 7. Dunno if Elements can do it or not.
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Re: Adding Water marks to photos

Postby Chads93GT » Jan 15, 2009 6:19 pm

Lol funny.

Photoshop 7, I have that as well. ON a disc, in my truck, uninstalled on my computer. I was looking in elements for water mark but I can't find it. The reason i quit using 7 was becuase you cant photomerge, and elements has photomerge. Go figure huh ;)
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Re: Adding Water marks to photos

Postby Jeff Bartlett » Jan 15, 2009 6:51 pm

Photoshop 7 is pretty old, it came out in 2002 (early enough that it actually predates the Camera Raw functionality). CS4, the current version, is actually Photoshop 11 and includes a photomerge option that outperforms many third-party applications specifically designed for stitching panoramic photos together.

That said, the easiest/simplest way to put a watermark on a digital image is probably to put the text you want in its own layer and then lower the opacity of this layer to taste. More attractive and/or comlicated options include the embossing filter or other filters; there are lots of tutorials on how to do this, just go to Google and search away!

If you're looking to put a digital "signature" on your photo, you can go to file / file info and fill in the "copyright status" & "copyright notice" fields. But I doubt people interested in stealing photos are particularly concerned with this.
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Re: Adding Water marks to photos

Postby Chads93GT » Jan 15, 2009 7:11 pm

I think I figured it out. I found a crappy tutorial about how to do it on adobe that i had to keep looking for the icons in the program before I finally got it.

I don't really know what else to put other than copyright,
Last edited by Chads93GT on Jan 15, 2009 11:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Adding Water marks to photos

Postby wyandottecaver » Jan 15, 2009 7:53 pm

Chad,

I typically use " LT Webb 2009" etc. this way they know WHO is the owner.
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Re: Adding Water marks to photos

Postby Jeff Bartlett » Jan 15, 2009 8:00 pm

that's a good idea, i'm going to start putting "LT Webb" on all my photos too!
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Re: Adding Water marks to photos

Postby Chads93GT » Jan 15, 2009 8:02 pm

Yeah, Ill add LT Webb too ;)

Thanks for the tip!
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Re: Adding Water marks to photos

Postby wyandottecaver » Jan 15, 2009 8:07 pm

:rofl:
I'm not scared of the dark, it's the things IN the dark that make me nervous. :)
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Re: Adding Water marks to photos

Postby Teresa » Jan 16, 2009 4:36 pm

A US copyright should have name of copyright holder, "c" mark or the word copyright, and the date. Not wanting to get into the copyright hassle here...http://www.copyright.gov/ but most places people put a copyright can be cropped out of the photo, so cathodex's solution of encoding your name into the file is probably better than mucking up the photo.

You do realize, that the copyright doesn't legally mean boo if it is not registered in DC? And even if it is, for any claim for less than $999 in damages, all it is legal to recover is a cease and desist order? I would look into the copyleft (creative commons) protection in which you limit the rights to your image, instead... For example: OK to copy for personal or non-commercial purposes, with attribution, etc. http://creativecommons.org/

If people want something badly enough, they're gonna take it. If you don't want photos lifted, keep them off the Internet. If you tell people they can use the images, but only with attribution to your name, or your website, 97% of them will do so.
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Re: Adding Water marks to photos

Postby Chads93GT » Jan 16, 2009 7:46 pm

Thanks Teresa. I guess I am not SUPER worried about it, as I never upload any of my high resolution photos. If someone wants to take a photo that I post and try to pass it off as their own, they are only going to have a 100kb copy with an extremely low resolution that cant be made bigger. I think it would be kind of goofy to post a high res photo you took that is truely unique, I guess that is why I don't do it ;)
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Re: Adding Water marks to photos

Postby StevenSmith » Jan 16, 2009 10:44 pm

Here's how I do it. I put together a nice photo tutorial for you.

Download GIMP (GNU Photo Manipulation Program). Or... pay hundreds of dollars for photoshop. Either way, I really don't care.

http://gimptutorial.shutterfly.com/21

Hope this makes sense.

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Re: Adding Water marks to photos

Postby johncwoods » Jan 19, 2009 1:13 pm

I think that many of you misunderstand the purpose and the practical effect of watermarking an image. As a working professional photographer, I can assure you that watermarking by itself cannot prevent the theft of an image. Many methods exist to protect photos, but a watermark is primarily used to identify, not protect an image. The most common method of invisible watermarking embeds a coded pattern of digital noise into the image. The stronger the noise, the more visible the watermark becomes. The mark is embedded and follows the image around even when it is copied. When the noise pattern is identified by a computer, it shows up as a “copyright” warning/identification when opened in an imaging program.

Watermarking works the same way as a lock on a door: Locks keep honest people out. Watermarking does only one thing for certain: it warns a user that the image belongs to someone else – something they already know. Honest people will use the watermark information to go through proper channels to acquire an image. Shady people will not. If you want to totally prevent “shady use,” don’t post it.

Photoshop uses the “digimarc” method of incorporating pattern noise to watermark an image. The digimarc function is built into the later Photoshop programs under the “Filter” menu and is very easy to use. There are also stand alone programs designed for the same purpose and all are user friendly. As mentioned in another post, The GIMP imaging program is freeware and will do the job. Copyright infringement is another topic altogether, but I can also assure readers that copyright protection does NOT work the way that 99% of the population thinks it does. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t use a watermark, just be sure you know what it is really doing.
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