Watermarking your images
If you post a lot of images on your personal web site and are trying to make money from them then the last thing that you want is to have someone steal them. Image theft is very big and many photographers find their images stolen and sold elsewhere. Because the Web is so big it can be very costly to pursue legal action and most do not, so for this reason thieves take advantage of this. If this happens to you and you find your image on some website you can contact the web administrator with proof that you took the photo and most will remove the image from their site.
To help prevent this from happening to you there are 2 ways that you can help protect your images, one is shrink them to a small size before loading them. Do not rely on thumb nails. If someone right clicks it’s easy to steal and the file size you uploaded is the file size they will download.
But the most secure way is to add a watermark to your image. Watermarking is a way of telling everyone that your image is copywrited and it is illegal to download it. Also if you water mark an image it is hard is erase the watermark.
Most photo editing programs have a watermarking filter you can apply. If you have a logo that would be the best image to use as your watermark; or you can use copy write, the year you took the picture and use your name.
When watermarking an image what you are doing is placing a transparent image over the photo an protecting it on the web. This is what most professional photographers will do on the web to prevent the image from being stolen.
In this image I added text to the photo turned opacity to 50% and tilted the text. I saved under a different file name and flattened the image.
Camera HP 315 point and shoot.
Refernces:
Candeekis.com
Uconomix.com
tips, digital photography, copywrite, watermark
August 8th, 2007 at 8:00 am
i do put watermarks however i am not quite that sure if i’m doing it right. i put just plain text in one corner of the photo. i don’t think it’s enough though. do you have any ideas just how should one put a watermark?
August 8th, 2007 at 9:13 pm
You’d want to cover enough of the image so that it cannot be cropped without destroying the actual photo. But you want the viewer to be able to see the image. I usually cover the image from in a diaginal way just off center as I did in the photo I posted. make your watermark at 50% opacity to your image but dark enough to see it.
August 10th, 2007 at 7:45 am
thanks jamie. i’ll try that one out.