Did you know that your digitally watermarked images can communicate your copyright and contact information to your site visitors?

Include the download link for the free Digimarc for Images reader on your web site and make it easier for visitors to learn more about your images. 

With a single right click visitors to your site can see more information via a pop-up window versus clicking through additional pages on your website.

Download the free reader to detect and read covert digital watermarks. The reader is available on Windows XP and Vista.  System Requirements:

• Windows Vista SP1, Internet Explorer 7
• Windows XP SP3, Internet Explorer 6 and 7

Jpeg compression is a great tool for reducing image files sizes. It allows you to post larger images on the web and email an image that’s large enough to produce a good quality print. With Jpeg compression you have a trade-off between image quality and compression – better image quality, less compression and vice versa.

Most people using Jpeg don’t realize that their image is being changed unless they see the affects of very heavy compression or they compress non-photographic artwork with hard edges like an illustration or line art. Simply put, Jpeg works by sampling areas of an image that the human eye has trouble discerning into larger blocks. Depending on the image and compression the detail in these areas are lost as larger blocks of a single color are used to maximize compression.

Hello! I’ll be presenting a webcast on Tuesday, April 14 and would love for you to sit-in. Although this webcast is primarily targeted to solution providers in the digital asset management and content management spaces, there will be a lot of good information presented related to digital watermarking that you may find interesting.

Here is a link to where you can read the formal introduction to the webcast and register if it sounds like information you’d enjoy gaining: www.digimarc.com/resources/webcast_14APR09.asp

Today's topic will be remedial for many Photoshop users.If, by chance, you've not tried creating scripted actions to automate tasks, this will be a simple introduction to a great tool within Photoshop.

I'd like to thank Alastair Reed for taking the time to walk through this outline of the process. He's an experienced Photoshop user who had never scripted an action before.

We'll start very simply and record an action that will embed a watermark.The sample file is from the March 8th visual watermarking example.I've flattened the layers and resized to the size I want to display on the web.

For those of us who have been in the digital image business for a number of years, it is pretty exciting to see the emergence of technologies that are now making those images interactive. For photographers, this opens up a whole new realm of possibilities and added value for your clients. In addition to digital watermarking, we’re beginning to see the use of 2-D barcodes and image recognition technologies to link readers of printed materials to video, the web, and more. 

This provides an incredible opportunity for the ailing publishing industry who must find a way to bridge their businesses to the internet. It’s also great for advertisers looking for new ways to engage consumers and get them to interact with their brands.

The “Perfect” watermark: a covert watermark that can be tracked on the web and a visual watermark that only appears when the image is printed.

Many customers wish there was such a product. If you take a few minutes to think about how to secure the viewing and printing environment, you start to get an idea why this is not a simple “Plug & Play” solution. It requires a secure reader and print application/plug-in that your potential customers would also have to use to view your images, but you want potential customers to view your images quickly and easily on the web.  If there was only one web browser that everyone used and it came with this “Perfect” plug-in preinstalled, this might be possible.

While we continue to look for the “Perfect” solution, I do have a work around you may want to try. You’ll need technical expertise, some time to burn and a special project that would justify the effort.  Personally I think this workflow would be too much work to produce just a few images, but if you are putting together a catalog with lots of images, this could be a process you might wish to explore.

Content theft, copyright infringement, and plagiarism happens everyday, whether it is intentional or not. Most people don’t realize the ease of infringement, but it surely IS very easy in this digital age. With images, it’s even easier nowadays. A simple Google image search can turn up any of your works for use by anybody. Many may not care, especially if the work is being used for good purposes, such as education or non-profit. But if your hard work was being used to generate revenue, then I think most people would care. By protecting your images with a digital watermark, your work can be identified as yours at anytime; maybe it is not for revenue generation, but it could easily be used for name recognition.

It’s easy to get information from a digitally watermarked image. The Digimarc Reader for Images is a free browser plugin that will identify images containing a digital watermark. You can download it at: www.digimarc.com/mypicturemarc/download/default.asp

One of the most frequent questions I get asked is if you can release the same image to multiple partners and use the watermark to trace back to who the images were sent to if they are found online. Call it forensic tracking; call it leak protection; call it whatever you want – it nets out the same. Essentially you want to know this: "If I find an image being used inappropriately online, can I use the watermark to give me information about how it got there to begin with?" The answer to this question is, yes, you can...

No doubt you’ve seen logos, © and other information layered on top of images. These are what are most commonly thought of as a watermark. Their use in images is to declare ownership and perhaps help generate revenue if the visual watermark contact information survives. As you can guess by my inference, visual watermarks can be removed, often by just cropping out this information.

If you are going to add a visual watermark to your image, don’t be shy. Placing a little bit of text in a corner is too easy to remove. As you can see in the image below, it wouldn’t take much to crop out the visual watermark in an image editing program, such as Photoshop, or simply placing it in a layout program and cropping out the lower part of the image...

If you’re selling images on the web, you want to supply sample images large enough for review. Ideally, you want the customer to buy a high-resolution image from you, and not supply them with a sample they can easily edit and "borrow" from you.

This year was my first time attending the Photographers' Marketing Association (PMA) International Convention and Trade Show. My first impression was acronym overload. In addition to PMA, you have DIMA, PIEA, PSPA, SPAA, PPFA and PSRO. If you really want to know what they all stand for, you can visit their website at www.pmai.org. What I picked up at this event is yet another industry experiencing the same shrinkage and economic struggles as many others; but with strong promise for those who can figure out how to monetize the onslaught of digital images being used online. Think search, storage and organization. At least that's what I think is needed to manage the volumes of photos that people are dumping on their computers.

Here are the facts... there are more photos being taken now then ever before. Our photographs are just as precious and valuable to us today as at anytime in the past. Film is dead. Everyone owns a digital camera. More and more people are upgrading their cameras and are now buying customized, "designer" cameras that appeal to the individual. It's all about personalizing everything these days — even your camera. While more and more photos are uploaded to the hugely popular social networking sites such as Facebook, people still print photos. And the popularity of scrapbooking, photo books, and printing pictures on all sorts of objects doesn't appear to be going away.