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05-30-2011, 12:53 PM   #1
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Watermarking a picture for protection

I am just wanting to know how to watermark a picture. I have a "home" picture editing program, but I can't do it there. I don't want the mark to show unless someone tries to grab the picture and print it for themself.

05-31-2011, 02:16 AM   #2
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I have placed my photographs over the net for over 12 years, some were stolen and re-used improperly by unscrupulous individuals. I may share two comments:

*When I want to put watermarks, it is visible all the time. I found that this dissuade some.

*I also enter my details as photographer and copyright holder in the EXIF automatically in-camera. This is a feature of K-7 and other recent Pentax dSLR.

Hope that the comment will help...
05-31-2011, 09:16 AM   #3
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I'm not an expert in watermarking, but I can't imagine how a watermark that doesn't show on screen could somehow appear on a print. The point of an invisible watermark as far as I know is simply to provide a way of proving an image is yours. If you want it to show on the print, it's going to show on screen too, unless someone has figured out some special clever way of constructing watermarks that exploit something particular about how certain printers works that could make an otherwise invisible watermark appear when printed on those printers. And I doubt it would be possible to make it work for any but one particular line of printer.

The normal way to discourage prints is to simply not post anything high enough resolution to print. Something 400x600 pixels, for instance, is a nice viewing size online, but wouldn't print worth much.
06-01-2011, 04:56 AM   #4
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Since you don't have software to add the watermark you might try Gimp. Gimp will do it and a Google will show many techniques. There's one technique to add a watermark hidden in a layer but, as Mark has said, I can't see a way of just excluding a watermark until it is printed.
There is also a plug-in for Gimp called G'MIC which makes it easy to add a visible watermark (it's in the Various list after the plug-in is installed). No guarantee the watermark can't be removed.

06-01-2011, 08:38 AM   #5
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One of the things I love about my K-x is I can now put that info in the exif data on every photo I take, double protection, but I am wondering can someone else strip that data like you can certain kinds of watermarks? As per the original poster. I usually try to make my watermarks nearly transparent but I usually also put them in some place where it is very difficult to remove one with a clone tool. That's often not ideal. It can still be too in the viewer's face sometimes, but I view that as a small inconvenience for a bit more secure watermark.
06-01-2011, 09:39 AM   #6
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Exif can be easily stripped out, edited, or added - any photo management package package has these capabilities. It is a basic means of identification, but it's not "protection" against someone willfully trying to infringe on your copyright.
06-01-2011, 09:46 AM   #7
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Photos on my flickr account I don't bother with. With my zenfolio.com based gallery I have they system add a pretty standard watermark to the lower left of each photo. I of course also have my cameras insert the copyright EXIF into the photos.

06-01-2011, 10:05 AM   #8
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if you really think you have had a lot of stolen images there is this option
ImageTracker?- The industry standard for image copyright enforcement | Pages - Products & Services

I've caught out a few of mine but never enough to justify this (I have about a 50% success rate with getting paid for the unauthorised usage the other 50% come down really quickly, though only about half of those even reply to the email) the odd one who trys to blow me off I send a letter to the web hosting site (usually the issue is blogs) and they remove it for me
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