Watermarking

Tweet

Watermarking - It is easy enough to add a notice of copyright to an image prior to putting it on display, but that takes a good deal of writing - the copyright notice and/or the copyright symbol, the date, and the person or entity holding the copyright to the image. It is even easier to protect your images by overlaying them with your notice of exclusivity of an image in the form of what is called a "watermark." You can see many examples of this practice on the Pixabay.com website, one of the websites from which you can download many kinds of free-to-use images that their owners or proprietors have placed there for the public to use, Along with the many public domain images, Pixabay.com offers a number of good and useful images for purchase. Those non-public-domain images are all displayed on the website overlaid with its commercial watermark,"Shutterstock." The watermarked images are easy to visualize, but the overlying "Shutterstock" watermark indicates origination and ownership - not freedom to use the watermarked images as though they were in the public domain and, thus, free for use by the public. These "Shutterstock" labeled images make it difficult or impossible for viewers to obtain the images sans watermarks without first paying for them. The watermark shown in the image, above, was simple to make with virtually any image editor that has a text editing function. This particular text was made in "bold" print, at 75 per cent fill value, from 36-point size "Adamsky Open" font. The word, "Watermark" was typed onto the image from within my choice of image editor - in this instance, the image editing program named, "Paint.Net." Another method, also rather easy to use, is to produce a watermark text of your liking and preserve it as an actual image. Use that watermark image as a layering image to overlay those images you want to protect in this manner. You could have several different watermarks, each of which might have a different purpose. With this type of usage, you could avoid having to type out each watermark individually. Also, there are computer programs available for watermarking that enable you to process an image at a time or batches of images in a single session. For occasional use, however, the ordinary image editor text function is likely to be sufficient for your purposes. Image: Watermarked "Twin Pine Cones on the Pine Tree" - Gus Kilthau