Watermark is a mark or lettering over the photo showing its owner: a photographer or a website. Here are a couple of watermark samples:
Both photo watermarks contain photographer name and thus help to identify who made the picture.
The first watermark contains a full copyright notice, containing a required “Copyright” word, a copyright sign © and a year the photo was taken. This type of watermarks provides greater owner details and is easy to read. You can search on Google for “Sebastian Dario” and find other photos of him and his contact details if you want to use his image.
The second watermark is a photographer’s signature. Michelangelo, Monet, Rembrandt and many other famous painters used this kind of a watermark for years and now it looks artistic. They didn’t call it “a watermark”, but it helped them to solve the problem what is a watermark for.
What is a Watermark For?
78% of photographers say their photos were stolen. This means that very large amount of world pictures are being used illegally. Watermarks according with a copyright registration are the weapon we can use to protect our photos.
What is a Watermark Protection
While many photographers place watermarks including their name and the copyright notice on their photos to prevent someone from stealing their pictures, it is possible to crop or paint over the watermark. Fortunately, the US law provides an even better reason to use watermarks.
Section 1202 of the U.S. Copyright Act makes it illegal for someone to remove the watermark from your photo. The fines start at $2500 and go to $25,000 in addition to attorneys’ fees and any damages for the ownership violation. (Source).
What is a Watermark Software
Watermark software is a computer program that places watermarks over your photos. It can process photos one-by-one or in a batch. So, if someone has a huge photo collection, she can watermark it in several minutes. Here is a short list of watermarking programs:
- Photoshop ($699)
- Visual Watermark ($39.95)
- Visual Watermark Lite (Free)
I purchased this software sometime ago and although it does allow me to watermark my photos…I don’t know where they go once I watermark..totally useless to me
Hildy, a couple of questions:
1) If you’re running Windows: do you click the Watermark button in the bottom-left, or the Save Watermark button on the top?
2) After clicking the watermark button, the program asks you for an output folder. What folder do you select?
I’ve made a small tutorial for you:
How to set an output folder
Please let me know if this helps.
“78% of photographers say their photos were stolen. This means that 78% of world pictures”
This can be true only if we suppose that all photographers produce nearly the same amount of photos. ;-) And that only photographers produce pictures, not amateurs… So, I’d suggest to write instead that “very large amount of world pictures were stolen”.
Roger that
Hi, all.
I purchased Visual Watermark excited that my watermark problems would be solved — and immediately ran into problems. First, alt + 0,1,6,9 does absolutely nothing. Not on a Word document, and not in photoshop. The text cursor sits there blinking and mocking me for expecting a miracle, or something.
Second, it seems that Visual Watermark is only good for adding text to an image? Nowhere does it tell how to import an icon to use as the watermark. It permits importing a document of several different protocols (gif, jpeg, tif, etc.), but to import any of those merely shows up as an image on a white (or other color) background. Transforming merely transforms a blank rectangle. Is that all there is? I spent twenty bucks on that? So, unless I’m content to use text as my watermark I’m outta luck?
Can anyone give me some guidance?
Hi,
If Alt+0,1,6,9 doesn’t work on your system, use Visual Watermark’s menu to add a copyright: . The last part of the article shows that menu.
Visual Watermark doesn’t support ico files, but GIF, JPEG, TIF and PNG. PNG and GIF formats support background transparency. Convert your ico into one of these formats to get a transparent background. Using PNG format you will be able to save as big pictures as you want. It is not limited to 512×512 as the ICO format is.
If you want to use JPEG or TIF format, there is a “Remove background” checkbox when adding image as a watermark. Enable it and you will get rid of the white background on JPEG files.