We’ve had increasing interest by our customers on how to best maintain the integrity of digital watermarks. Here are a few tips and tricks that should help in the long run:

High strength watermarks survive the best.
Make sure to embed your images with a higher strength; this just means you are putting more watermark signal into your image. With our new "Chroma" technology, we suggest using an embed strength of 3 or 4, as the watermark should still be imperceptible. It is also easier for your watermark to survive when you save your final image at a maximum quality setting in Photoshop.

If you exhibit at tradeshows, you know you're paying a small fortune to spend a few moments communicating your message to potential customers. To reinforce that momentary connection you give them a memento, AKA tradeshow swag. Can that notepad, mug or T-shirt communicate with them?

Let's make that notepad, mug or T-shirt tell your story long after the event!

By adding a digital watermark to that coffee mug, the customer's smartphone could be playing your video, getting your latest product updates, adding you to their contacts or entering your contest. This could be done with a QRcode, but which mug would you prefer to give away?

Learn how to accomplish this with Digimarc Discover...

Join John Batdorff, professional photographer and author of Black and White: From Snapshots to Great Shots, as he shares with you his vision and straight forward techniques for creating compelling black and white images — protected by Digimarc for Images. Registration is free!

Check out some of John's great photos and read his blog at http://www.batdorffphotography.com.

If you're one of the lucky ones who've discovered the value of using Action Scripts (to digitally watermark lots of photos, of course) and your software of choice is Adobe Elements, you should read Erin's blog at Texas Chicks.

It seems that purchasers of Adobe Elements 9 on the Mac App Store are NOT allowed to install action scripts through the Effects Palette.

Be sure to read Erin's blog (she's an Action Scripting Goddess for those using Elements). Just incase you're lazy... the solution is (a spoiler alert?); buy direct from Adobe or Amazon to avoid this issue.

Thanks again to the Texas Chicks!

If you've been wondering about how to use the Digimarc Photoshop Plugin within Lightroom, here is a great tutorial presented by Rafael Concepcion (RC). It is very simple and RC walks you through it step-by-step.

RC Concepcion is not only an Adobe certified instructor in Photoshop, Illustrator, and Lightroom, but also a professional photographer and content developer. Oh, wait! He's also the author of the recently released book "Get Your Photography on the Web," which is the perfect book for anyone ready to post their work to the web. There's a ton of information in this book and I highly recommend it for everyone. You can learn more about Rafael and even purchase that book from his website here. It's on sale too, so hurry up and get your copy now!

We've all heard how all things digital live forever on the internet. It's the same for posted photos of drunk friends and product reviews.

I was surprised to learn that a 2004 review of Digimarc for Images is a top ten result on Google and Bing searches for Digimarc.

The product that Ken Rockwell reviewed in 2004 is a number of updates behind and two major upgrades out of date with Digimarc's product currently offered for the needs of pro and amateur photographers alike. So what's a blogger to do? It would be unfair and rather silly for me to rebut Mr. Rockwell's 2004 conclusions...

I sure wish I could have written a "Complete Photography Guide," but Lifehacker did such a great job it seems silly for me to duplicate (wishful thinking as well I should add).

So if you want to learn:

• How your Digital Camera works
• What the automatic settings are supposed to do
• Manual settings – explained in English
• Some good tips for composition – if you don’t know the rule of thirds, now’s the time
• Post production – lots of good info, just hope you have Photoshop

Be sure to check out their links under additional resources at the bottom of the main page. If you’re looking for hardware, a NAPP membership will deliver good deals in addition to their Photoshop tutorials.

For hardware reviews, I like DPReview.com and friends like Steves-Digicams.com. A game changing possibility that was just anounced is Lytro's really cool lens technology. Hopefully this recommendation won’t look too silly in a couple of years.

And of course, don't forget to watermark images you post to the web and those you print!

In the interest of full disclosure: Digimarc and I work with the NAPP folks, but all the other websites mentioned are ones that I just happen to like.

"Discussions" regarding visual watermarks; those lovely "embossed" copyright symbols, artist signatures and website listings you see on many artist portfolio images can be entertaining. Thomas Hawk has a particularly good rant discussion going in his blog "On Watermarks and Signatures" and his "You Are a Thief" motif is an excellent example of going over the top with a visual watermark. It looked like fun, so I made my own.

As Thomas Hawk points out the primary issue really comes down to overall purpose:

• As Thomas Hawk feels about it, are you like many just making "an advertisement for your work?"
• Are you using visual watermarks like "photo signatures to stop the 'photo thieves?'"

Are you in marketing? If so, you've probably heard about QR Codes by now (especially if you've read a few of my last posts) and my guess is you either love 'em or hate 'em. Either way, you should know that a digital watermark can provide the same outcome but without the clunkiness.

I ran across this great article by Lauren Goldstein that basically says digital watermarks are QR codes, but without the clunkiness. That is so true! Her website is focused on B2B demand generation. Read the article and learn how digital watermarks can be used for B2B demand generation.

Greetings from Mobile World Congress 2011 in Barcelona Spain. This conference is the largest gathering for anything related to mobile and yours truly was there, not only to witness the swarm of 55,000 people, but to launch the Digimarc Discover Online Services Portal (OSP). We had our own booth right in the App Planet, where many of the folks that stopped by thought we were the coolest new technology around. You can see some panaromic photos of the the entire show right here.

With the Online Services Portal you can now turn your printed content into new rich interactive experiences, and all of it can be done directly from the portal. That's right, just create a free acount, watermark your image, identify the URL that the image will link to, and select when and how long it will be active. Once your watermarked images are printed, they can be read using our free Digimarc Discover reader, downloadable from the iTunes App Store or the Android Market. No barcodes cluttering up your layout. Setting up an account is simple and during our Open Beta ( through May 31st 2011) you can turn your printed content interactive for free. So what are you waiting for? Go to www.digimarc.com/portal to get started!