The Logic behind Screenshot Watermarking

Screenshot watermarking involves the process of overlaying a secondary image onto a primary source image for the purpose of providing copyright protection. After all, screenshots or digital photos uploaded on the Internet are still components of intellectual property, and we can never know just how people would make use of the pictures that they can get via the web. Thus, it would be so much better and safer for us to educate ourselves in going about screenshot or digital watermarking.

There are actually two types of watermarking in the arena right now: visible and invisible. Visible watermarking, as implied by the name itself, indicates that the information is made visible on the picture itself. These can even be referred to as printed watermarks. The visible information could be in the form of text or a particular logo that can be used to identify the owner of the picture concerned. The key here is to overlay your watermark in a manner that it would be extremely hard to remove from the primary source image.

Invisible watermarking, on the other hand, has your watermarks completely invisible. The invisible watermark is actually an overlaid image that one cannot see physically, for the detection of the watermark would entail a certain algorithm to it. The best example of invisible watermarking is in the case of digital audio files. The invisible watermark is laid over the digital media, which prevents unauthorized copying of the file, no matter what format it appears in.

The watermarking lifecycle can actually be broken down into three stages.: embedding, attach, and detection. Embedding, being the first step, is actually that point in time when your algorithm accepts a particular host, thereby embedding the data, and then producing the watermarked signal.

In the attack stage, the watermarked signal is now transmitted to another person. If this particular person attempts to make any sort of modification, then an attack occurs. This is not the physical sort of attack at all. this is when pirates make an attempt to take out the digital watermark by means of modification. There are several ways that you can modify a copyrighted image, like cropping the image itself, or adding noise to the image or the video intentionally.

In the detection stage, this is when an algorithm is applied to the attacking signal so that the watermark is extracted accordingly. If the signal remains undisturbed and is not modified in any way during transmission, then this means the watermark remains where it is. Where stronger watermarking applications are concerned, the algorithm doing the extracting should be efficient in the production of the watermark, in spite of the strong modifications done to the signal. However, in fragile watermarking, the algorithm at hand would fail if the signal is modified in any way.

Now that you know the technicalities behind screenshot watermarking, you are now ready to do some watermarking of your own. There are many watermarking applications that you can use for your endeavors. You can download these applications over the web, with most of them offering trial periods for a certain period of time. Just make sure to go with the application that holds a lot of useful features for you.