Hopefully you've received an email from us or checked out the Digimarc for Images website and saw notices about the 4.0 upgrades; it's something we're really excited about. This upgrade to our embedding software — including the Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements plug-ins — has a new watermarking technology called "Chroma" that we think you're going to like. The account administration area has been refreshed with some nice new features.

So log into you Digimarc account if it’s been awhile, you'll be pleasantly surprised.

After downloading the new plug-ins here, don't forget to upgrade your reader plug-in for Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer while you're at it.

The Digimarc for Images "Best Practices Guide" has been updated as well to help you get the most from the new Chroma embedding. We'll have a technical brief posted on the DFI website shortly. If you don't want to wait, I've included some of the technical brief here to get you started on why we added Chroma embedding...

How Classic and Chroma Watermarks Interact with the Human Visual System

Classic watermarking uses the luminance of an image to create a digital watermark. Luminance can be described as a component of an image’s contrast or as the lightness (or darkness) components in an image’s tone scale. The human eye is sensitive to modifications to an image’s luminance, more so when higher watermark strengths are used to increase robustness. In Classic mode, one can embed a persistent watermark that remains fairly imperceptible while surviving some level of scaling and formatting.

A Chroma watermark uses the chrominance component of an image’s color space. The human eye is less sensitive to differences in chrominance, so a stronger watermark can be imperceptibly embedded in areas of an image that the eye has difficulty resolving. The new Chroma mode also greatly improves the amount of scaling the watermark will survive and reduces the visual artifacts that can result from a more robust watermark.

 
This image illustrates the difference between Classic and Chroma modes’ effects on the human visual system. Click on the image so you can see that grayscale image appears more detailed than the yellow image — the vertical bars are more apparent. But the yellow image is just the grayscale image viewed as the yellow channel of a CMYK file (or the blue channel of an RGB file). One can’t see the bars as well in the yellow image because the human eye can’t resolve the higher frequencies in the image when it switches from gray to yellow. The Chroma watermark embedder exploits this feature of the human visual system to hide more of the watermark signal in color regions where the human eye has less acuity.

Keep an eye out for more blogs and info about the DFI 4.0 upgrades, and feel free to ask questions or suggest topics.