You are most likely using Digimarc for Images to communicate your ownership and thereby copyright of your images. I’ll be the first to admit my naïveté on all the rules governing Copyright law.

Part of the confusion to me is that human nature, fair usage and copyrights don’t always provide black and white rules. If someone is using your image for commercial (an ad campaign) or personal gains (a blog), should the former matter more than the latter? You decide not to authorize the use of one of your images for a product; the agency then decides to reproduce an image almost exactly like yours, but not quite.  At what point are they infringing on your copyright?  You upload images of yourself seated near a celebrity onto your Facebook page and then see those images used in a publication or commercial website, do you have any recourse?

I could ramble on about all the possibilities, and believe me I just cut out three paragraphs, but since I’m not an expert I thought you may be interested in the following links.

A few weeks ago, in Lossy Image formats Part 1 I discussed the JPEG image format and the affects of lossy image compression on watermarking.

Part 2, we’ll discuss the other lossy compression that is often used for web images, which is the Indexed Color mode.  While many file formats support an Indexed Color mode, these are most often GIF especially since the GIF format requires the image to be in Indexed Color mode.  Indexed Color is thought of as a lossy because the color space for most images is reduced from millions of colors to 256 colors or less when indexed.  So while a GIF format is not lossy compression, the process of indexing the image color space is.

I recently presented a webcast to Digital Asset Management and Content Management Solutions providers. The information covered included the benefits of digital watermarking in three specific applications. What I have found to be true in my many years of working with digital watermarking technology is this: How various businesses work with images online varies, but their interest around where their images go online and how they are used is constant.

If you are interested in learning more about how three companies are using digital watermarking, I encourage you to listen to the recorded version of this webcast.
Click here to access this webcast online.

These 2 terms are often used interchangeably. The problem is that there is no set definition for image resizing which can create some unexpected surprises.

When I produced files for printing, we made a couple of “house rules”:
1. When someone requested that an image be resized, the resolution of the image was not changed.
2. When resampling an image, however, the resolution of the image would change.

Ben Bounketh’s blog on DPI and Resolution explained how resolution is a fixed amount of pixels in an image. Refer to his comment, "If I said 'this 100 DPI image has a resolution of 300 x 300 pixels' you would know that it is a 3" x 3" image." We'll go a step further now and resize the 3" x 3" image, which is its bounding box, to 1” x 1” a 1/3 reduction. Since we did not change or lose any image data this 1” x 1” image still has the same amount of resolution, but since it is 1/3 smaller, all of those pixels are now packed together 3 times closer and the is image is now 300 dpi.

Most people have probably seen the terms "DPI" and "resolution" used interchangeably across the internet. The fact is they are related, but are different in meaning when describing an image. DPI stands for "Dots Per Inch" and represents the total number of "pixels" or "dots" that make up an inch in length. Resolution represents the total number of "pixels" or "dots" in the entire image.

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. 

Recently, I attended CTIA Wireless in Las Vegas and sat in on a number of the mobile marketing and advertising sessions. It was clear that more and more brand owners, marketers and advertisers are looking at running test campaigns with interactive digital images where mobile phones can be used to link printed photos to video, the web, special promos, and more.