I’m always in the mood for a tutorial. And, for those of you who live and breathe PhotoShop, the guys at PhotoShop User TV do a great job and have a plethora, yes I said “plethora,” of tips, tricks and tutorials.

In this episode not only does Matt Kloskowski do his best Yoda impersonation, but they also talk about the Digimarc for Images plug-in about 21 minutes in. Check this episode out and while you are there check out their other tutorials.

For the Tweet addicted, the "Photoshop Guys" are on Twitter. Follow them at: @ScottKelby, @DaveCross, and @MattKloskowski.

There is a very easy way to verify that your digital watermarks have remained with your images after you post them to the web.  Yes, your images can automatically be verified within Adobe Photoshop right after the embed process, but many times, when you upload them to a website, they get manipulated and this can, under certain conditions, destroy the watermark.  For those of you on a PC, you can download the free IE version of the Digimarc Reader for Images.  Once this is installed, all you need to do is browse your website and the browser will automatically look for Digimarc digital watermarks.  Once a digital watermark is detected, the toolbar will show a green check mark like this:

 

And if you have the Image Overlay option turned on, all digital watermarked images will show the “Circle d” in the bottom left corner of the image like this:

Now you can quickly see any images that did not retain the watermark.  Remember, the best way to ensure that your watermarks survive is to embed the watermark at the intended display resolution and as the last step in your design process.  Also, did you know you could right click on that “Circle d” and get information about the owner?  Try it! 

You may be wondering about how the marketing folks in large enterprises use digital watermarking in their businesses. I will be presenting a webcast on this topic on August 25 @ 10am Pacific. We’ll highlight how one of our largest customers uses our solution to avoid the disasters of confidential and/or embargoed images leaking onto the Internet, in addition to how they have increased their ability to track content and ensure it is being used at the right time, in the right places, by the right people. 

Here is a link to our site where you can read the whole spiel and register for the webcast. Hope to have you join us!

I’ve written before about the power of making your photos and other images interactive. Keep watch for more and more pilots using a range of technologies that enable your mobile phone to provide a wealth of new information and experiences from the printed page. Recently, we talked our CTO, Tony Rodriguez, into giving the world a quick demo of how digital watermarking can be used to bring newspapers and magazines to life. If pictures are worth a thousand words, then this video should be worth...? Well, a lot!

Take a minute and watch Tony as he explains what we are doing. Click here, then select "Video Demonstration" to watch the video.

You may wonder about this especially if you’ve only found your watermarked images on your own website. You ask yourself if Digimarc is really trying to find your images. No doubt communicating your copyright ownership and authorship is very important to you, but you may be thinking you’re part of the old joke about a person living in Los Angeles who is being pitched an amulet that is suppose to ward off polar bears. When they say there are no polar bears in Los Angeles, the pitchman says, “See how well it works!”

If you are manually searching for your images on the WWW, you know that the sheer size of the internet will require a great deal of luck to find them or very a good idea of exactly who your audience is.

If you’ve purchased a Gallery or Enterprise account that includes the Digimarc Search Service, you might be thinking your reports should have more found images by now. I can assure you it’s not from lack of trying. Currently, the service searches about 250,000,000 images per month. Yes, that number is about 250 MILLION images searched per month, for a total of around 3 BILLION images per year; and, we are working on increasing those numbers as I write this blog.

So, again you are asking “why doesn’t the service find more of my images?:

With this posting I thought I would give an update on some industry news related to stock photography sites.  This weekend I was looking around for images to use on a card that I was printing for my daughter and I ran into a posting about Getty Images.  They announced last week that they have bought yet another stock photo site: Stock.XCHNG.  Stock.XCHNG is a very popular, free stock photo house with a library of over 350,000 images.  I have used Stock.XCHNG many times in the past and hope the terms of use remain the same after this buy-out.  My friend over at PlagiarismToday.com has written an interesting article on this subject; read it by clicking here.