Our digital images blog primarily focuses on, you guessed it... "digital images;" although we occasionally sprinkle in relevant news and tips related to digital watermarking for printed materials and security applications.

Well today is one of those alternate posts. Our partner Complete Inspection Systems has integrated Digimarc digital watermarking technology into their track-and-trace solutions for packaging. Complete Inspection Systems' AutoProof Pro Imaging Suite can embed and authenticate Digimarc digital watermarks.

To learn more about their solution, here's a digital version of a brochure — or you can check out their website.

The question comes up many times; is digital watermarking some sort of fingerprint? The quick answer is no and both technologies are quite different.

Last week I shared a link to website that has a lot of valuable information about copyright and content theft. The author of PlagiarismToday also wrote an article on this very topic. Digimarc also provides a link to an excellent case study on the same topic, which you can download here.

I suspect a few of you have the same problem I have when buying gifts for the holidays. Do you end up giving yourself one or two as well? I've tried to limit this impulse to smaller ticket items, or at least to cool things that I wouldn't normally justify.

Here's a few items and sites of cool silly stuff I'm thinking of buying or doing to help stimulate the economy without breaking my budget.

The Photojojo store has some really cool toys. While the Diana lens is a little too retro for me, I'll probably blog a review of the Jelly phone filters sometime next year. Anyone crazy enough to record a video or photos while riding with the helmet digital camera mount, please please let me know! We might have to share...

If you want to impress the loved ones with your hands-on skills try out Make Magazine's blog, the crystalline Christmas ornaments will show you didn't sleep through high school chemistry after all.

Going green? Check out Lifehacker.com's cool use for those empty wine bottles. If you haven't already discovered Lifehacker, spend a couple of extra minutes exploring this really great site. Warning, it might be hours before you emerge.

FYI, I don't know anyone at these sites, receive anything from them or have any other reason to list them here except that I like them a lot.

Enjoy!

Oh, one last article to explain all this, maybe...

Our friends at ImageSpan have a great product, LicenseStream, and of course they blog about the latest LicenseStream news and offer tips and tricks to content owners.

The recently posted a two part series (can a series really be two parts?) on ways photographers can engage their clients during the holidays. 

My favorite tip is to reach out to potential partners who would be interested in bartering services. 

Adding my two cents to the their blog post, many web sites have remnant advertising inventory this time of year due to increased holiday traffic they are unable to sell. Instead of running low CPM "run of site" impressions they could be running ads to your storefront - in exchange for your images for use in future marketing efforts.

For those who are trying to design their own website and are not web designers by trade I have an interesting plug-in for you to check out. The folks at Medialab are a little crazy and came up with a plug-in for Photoshop that allows you to design a single webpage or a whole site.

I've played with the trial version and found it pretty easy. You basically need to learn their "program language" for labeling layers and a few additional tools that customize and tweak your site's functionality. I'll be honest that creating a quickie test page was simple enough, but I don't have the time to sit back and apply myself to really learning all the tools. It certainly seemed to have all the bells and whistles during my brief tour.

Are you an iPhone owner who enjoys image manipulation, is interested in fun apps, and has some time to kill? Then you may want to download ColorSplash. I recently downloaded the application and started to play around with it at a recent conference – which is what I do when the speaker is incredibly boring...

Facebook. Twitter. Picasa. Flickr. Blog. What else did I miss?

If you're anything like me, you have a variety of sites where to post your images. I post some images for friends on Facebook, then throw a few to the family over on Picasa, and then every once in a while tweet a couple more onto my personal blog to reach former colleagues (and provide fodder for the stalkers).

I recently stumbled across a site called Posterous which makes it easy to post your images online - to multiple sources - all via email. Simply email text, images, audio and video and route to the sites of your choosing. 

Over the next few weeks I'll do some testing with Digimarc for Images and share my results here.

So Kevin's last post with the link to that scary family photo site reminded me of one of my favorite guilty pleasures: The Photoshop Disasters blog. Having worked with art directors and designers for years I enjoy seeing just how bad Photoshop work can be. These ads must have just ran out of time, or maybe they just reached a point where the art direct didn't give a… well we've all been there, but here's a big "WOW "to letting these get published.

While digging up the link and having a quick perusal I ran across the Ralph Lauren goofy model shots with oddly distorted bodies. I forgot to check out the images when I heard about them last month and missed one of the best blog headlines - and subsequent comment discussion - ever on Boing Boing. Then there's the follow up from Ralph's people that Photoshop Disasters, Boing Boing and others had infringed on their ad content by reposting it, resulting in a few blogs actually removing the advertisements. This MSNBC video on Boing Boing explains a lot of this craziness better than I can.

I suspect ad folks at Ralph Lauren are pretty smart and they might have been seeing if they could generate a little extra publicity, plus seeing if they could use copyright laws to intimate bloggers. Or maybe they were just explaining their faux pas… maybe.

Personally, I'm glad those models don't actually look like the surreal Steve Madden doll head ads.

If I entered a drawing contest with preschoolers I would come in last place.  My best entry would feature a stick figure, a trapezoid looking sun and a bunch of lines and scribbles that might pass as a tree.

However, thanks to Sketch2Photo maybe I have some hope. Sketch2Photo is reportedly an "Internet Image Montage" project from five Chinese Computer Science and Technology students at Tsinghua University and the National University of Singapore. In three steps you can go from scribbles to finished product.

Step 1. Draw the outlines of the figures you want in your picture.

Step 2. Add labels for each of the items, as well as for the background.

Step 3. Sketch2Photo will then find real-life images to match your scribbles.

Check out a video about it posted on Vimeo.

Their site is currently down but look forward to checking it out. Is it real, vaporware or a fake altogether?

I just recently downloaded and installed the free Photoshop.com iPhone application. I know not everybody has an iPhone, but this is a pretty neat little application, and it's also supported on the iPod Touch. The app is very simple and allows you to take a snapshot and edit it directly from your device, then upload and share to your Photoshop.com account.

I'll quickly note here that you can get a free, basic Photoshop.com account that allows 2GB of storage or an upgrade to 20GB of storage (for a fee). Below I quickly listed some of the features that are included in the application. Also, the controls are very simple, you literally drag your finger across the screen to control each feature. Fun stuff for your photos!

• Crop, Rotate, and Flip your image
• Adjust Exposure, Tint, Saturation
• Convert the image to Black & White
• Turn your image into a Sketch or add Soft Focus
• Add Effects
• Vibrant
• Pop
• Border
• Vignette Blur
• Warm Vintage
• Rainbow
• White Glow
• Soft B&W