The Relevance of Adding Image Watermarks

Do you have a friend who is into digital photography? Have you been browsing through his website to take a look at the awesome pictures he has been taking? Surely, you must have noticed how his pictures bear an image watermark somewhere along the print, right? This somehow takes the fun out of looking at the pictures because the pictures themselves become a bit distorted. Ever wonder why your friend does this?

Your friend is smart to do this because image watermarking is actually a method of security. In the advent of computer technology and the Internet, it is so easy to grab pictures off the web and use them for your own purpose. In fact, you just might be guilty of this yourself. There is not much guilt to begin with because you are not claiming to be the photographer of the pictures you are grabbing off the web, right? Still, there are many people all over the web who do just that. They grab pictures off the websites of very talented photographers and post them on their own websites. What is worse is that they claim to have taken these works of art. Whatever happened to intellectual property and copyrights here? This is where the watermark enters the picture – pun intended.

When considering watermarking, the first step is finding the perfect watermarking software. To do this, analyze your needs and the features of the different brands and makes of software that you are considering getting. If you work on hundreds of photos at a time, then you might want to get software that lets you watermark your pictures by batch. Thumbnails would then have to be created for this purpose. Just remember that the software you get should answer your every need.

Once you find the perfect software, the next step is to choose your very own watermark – particularly, its size and its placement. Think of the watermark as your signature so make sure to choose well because you will have to stick with your mark from now on. Having a more intrusive watermark would definitely ward off those buggers from grabbing your pictures. But then again, such a watermark would make viewing your pictures more difficult.

Here are several types of watermark images that you might want to consider: generic, specific, date, image and copyright. The generic watermark blatantly shows that an image should not be grabbed because someone else owns it. Sample text for this watermark could be DEMO, SAMPLE, or simply DO NOT USE. Specific watermark, on the other hand, gives off specific text to show people that YOU own the picture and that it should not be used for any other purpose.

Date and copyright watermarks are self-explanatory already. The date when the picture was taken is used as the watermark, while the copyright watermark is just that – the word COPYRIGHT is placed all over the picture. This certainly gets the message across. The image watermark, on the other hand, could be the official logo of the company. This shows that a certain company claims rights to that picture. With the different types of watermark images that you can use, you will surely have what it takes to protect your photos from unauthorized use.