A number of folks are processing product image shots that have the product outlined, a drop shadow added, and then placed onto a white background. Next the watermark is added and is verified to be very strong; but when the image is saved as a JPEG, the watermark is very low or unreadable.

Please note that larger versions of the images are available by clicking on them.

This sample was watermarked using a durability setting of 1. While it verified as HIGH after watermarking, when saved as a JPEG using Photoshop’s JPEG MED setting of 5, it no longer reads. 

The likely reason for this is that the embedder plug-in added a slight amount of noise into the white areas to have “image data” to apply the watermark to. This very light tint, which contains a large area of the watermark, has been removed by the JPEG lossy compression. This is especially true if the image on top of the white background is small and the watermark durability setting is low.

Since some images don’t respond well to higher watermark durability settings, and increasing the image size by altering the JPEG settings might be a concern, you’ll want a different solution. This isn’t too hard to solve because the product image is already being isolated so we just need to add a background to achieve our requirements. Thanks to Photoshop layers, and the Digimarc for Images filter providing the ability to watermark individual layers, we can watermark an image with two different durability settings.

Here, I’ve prepped my Adobe stock art jazz guitar so it’s 360 x 360 pixels; made it a layer; removed the background; rotated the guitar; and added a drop shadow.

Next, I add a layer for my background. I could fill the new layer with white and watermark it at 4 and the guitar layer at 1, but I’ve already tested that combo and it just barely reads. So I’m going to fill the layer with 5% Cyan and then use the noise filter to add 4% uniform noise.

This isn’t a fixed setting. I’m merely creating a light background that will hold the watermark better and that I believe could add a nice appearance to my website if I also use it as a background tile.

Next I watermark the new background layer at 4 and the Guitar layer with a 1. I save the new image as a JPEG using the MED setting of 5 and see how it compares to the original white-only background.

We’ve gone from no detection of the watermark to a pretty good read; and there are a number of variables that can be adjusted to allow fine-tuning. For instance...

• I can make a darker or lighter background tint mix with noise or other textures to provide more image data for the watermark to be embedded into.
• I can increase the watermark durability setting for the product image. 
• I can make the canvas larger and/or the product image.
• I can increase the image quality setting when I save as JPEG.

A few additional thoughts:

• Whatever I decide to use as a background texture, I can probably create a 256 x 256 pixel version of it with a watermark to use as a background tile on web pages. Of course the texture has to be able to tile well.
• If my plug-in data is static (i.e. I just use the same copyright year, image ID or transaction number) I can actually define the watermark background tile as a pattern and just fill the background layers of images to save time, especially if I am running a script.

Let me know what you think of this workflow or if you come up with a great background mix to place images onto.

Cheers,
Don