i'm still on the fence if i should watermark my shots before putting them up on flickr. whenever i view the site it always rubs me the wrong way when i see an ugly watermark ruining amazing photos. the types of watermarking i can handle would be something like this, Baby House Finch on Flickr - Photo Sharing! (someone from this forum i think :P) and maybe Serious on Flickr - Photo Sharing! most of the ones with a name and links on top of the image seem to be ugly.
how does it help with security and theft anyways? because i can almost guarantee i can rip any watermark right off any photo. i just don't see the point of them a lot of the time.
If you put your name outside the image area it is not really watermarking, it's framing. The frame can easily be cut away, negating the purpose of a watermark.
If you're not really worried about image theft then you don't really need to watermark. I do it from time to time, but not consistently.
I usually watermark images going to Flickr in one step via the LR/Mogrify plugin and the Flickr uploader piglet.
I generally put it off to the side but obscuring some element or jacking up the crop. I want it unambiguous but not obnoxious.
It won't stop someone determined to steal a photo, but then nothing will. The goal is to discourage casual theft, prove intent if someone steals it anyway, and get some passive marketing if/when people see the stolen image outside of the context in which I've provided it.
I'm testing trial version of software called Icemark which is able to embedd invisible watermark in the picture. You write some text, Icemark embedds it in the picture and afterwards you can extract that info from the photo as a proof that photo is yours.
I supose it would be best to use it together with some ordinary, visible watermark, to let people know that photo is your property.
If someone is aware of some other such software or even better Lightroom plugin I would like to try it.
Impete, your idea of integrating the watermark onto the image is quite good and will work fine for a small quantity of images. Where it will really become a chore is when you're processing dozens of images at a time.
If this is the case, you might want to explore perhaps adding a transparent watermark on the same spot. To second junyo, LR/Mogrify works great for this purpose.
You just need to experiment with transparency and the type of overlay to find one that works with dark as well as with light photos.
I think the only proper way to visibly watermark is to manually size and place the watermark where it is least intrusive or even contributes to the composition of the overall image. All the photos on my website are watermarked in that way.
If I can at least make my photos an unattractive target to a thief, I'm happy. Of course the biggest thing I do to prevent this is just posting 800x600 or smaller versions of my photos. They're poor for printing and it would be easy to prove ownership by producing a RAW file. Watermarking is secondary.
