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Personal Finances of a Self-Employed

Posted on July 25, 2011 by Ivan
Piggy Bank - Photographer Personal Finances

Today, I wanted to speak about personal finances of a self-employed person – photographers, artists and freelancers in general. I started Visual Watermark as a part-time project while working with my ex-employer DevExpress Inc. It was fun and easy side-project since it yields small but steady revenue and didn’t require too much effort to support it. This year I left my day job to fully concentrate on my side-project.

This move gave me an opportunity to do what engages me a lot and still much more flexibility to spend time with my small baby. On another hand, it cut our revenues in half. I don’t have “extra” money anymore, money to buy a trip to the ocean without putting aside for a few months or money that I can put into business development if necessary. I still had enough to pay my expenses but no penny above that.

One day, I received an email from Google that my Adwords account was blocked because of insufficient funds on my card. Continue reading →

Posted in business, marketing | 1 Comment

Visual Watermark for Mac Updated

Posted on July 22, 2011 by Ivan

July 20 Apple released a brand new OS called Lion. It brings up 250+ new features, including redesigned interface.

We have tested Visual Watermark for compatibility issues yesterday and unfortunately found one. Program toolbar is mangled – question signs are painted instead of normal buttons we all expect to see on the toolbar. It seems Apple engineers removed these rounded buttons from their OS completely.

Hopefully, we were able to quickly change button styles to rectangular and now it looks OK. I believe now they look even better and up to date because old rounded buttons looked outdated in the new sharp Lion UI.

This update is already available on our website and is free to all existing customers. Simply download new version and replace your current installation. No “re-activation” required.

Download link

Posted in update | Leave a comment

Resolving the Google+ Fine Print Dilemma

Posted on July 18, 2011 by Ivan

What is Google+ ?

I guess that all of you have already heard about a new overwhelming project from Google – a social networking service code-named Google+.

It was born only 1 month ago, but has already got more than 10 million members and one of its basic approaches to social networking (so-called ‘Life Circles’) is agreed by many experts to be the thing that users will like very much – so much that Google+ will be able to make a revolution and replace Facebook on its throne.

Of course, all these things are accompanied by a very loud buzz from people who already participate in a new Google network or who just evaluate its pros and cons. Most of this buzz seems to be very positive and full of excitement, while some news makes me feel anxious.

Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

How To Set an Output Folder on Mac

Posted on July 13, 2011 by Ivan

Visual Watermark for Mac needs you to do 3 things: select a list of photos you want to watermark, design a watermark and provide the program with an output folder. Output folder is a place on your hard disc that will contain watermarked photos. This guide will show how to select it and how to locate your photos after watermarking.

Continue reading →

Posted in tutorial, visual watermark for mac | 5 Comments

How To Set a Avatar – Gravatar Tutorial

Posted on July 13, 2011 by Ivan
How To Set a Avatar - Front Image

I noticed just a couple of people here in comments have avatar set for their accounts. It is OK, but if you wish to personalize your account here a little bit, here is a step-by-step guide.

Continue reading →

Posted in tutorial | 2 Comments

What is a Watermark

Posted on July 12, 2011 by Ivan

Watermark is a mark or lettering over the photo showing its owner: a photographer or a website. Here are a couple of watermark samples:

What is a watermark - a sample #1What is a watermark - signature watermark sample

Both photo watermarks contain photographer name and thus help to identify who made the picture.

Continue reading →

Posted in copyright protection, watermark | 7 Comments

How to Watermark Photos in Aperture Library

Posted on July 6, 2011 by Ivan

Aperture is photo management software for Mac that allows you to store and refine high volumes of photos. All images are stored in a special folder called library. This means when importing photos from a camera memory card Aperture copies them into an internal storage (“library”). You can easily erase your memory card while Aperture will store original photos for you on your hard disc.

However, this makes photo watermarking a bit inconvenient since Visual Watermark cannot retrieve images from the library, only Aperture can. You should export your photos from the library first. This tutorial shows how this can be done.
Continue reading →

Posted in tutorial | 2 Comments

Your Photos Are Stolen!

Posted on July 1, 2011 by Ivan

78% percents of US photographers say their photos were being used illegally
Most likely your photos were stolen too

Can it be possible to find who is using your images? Now there is an answer. Continue reading →

Posted in copyright protection, legal, photoshop, tutorial, watermark | Tagged , , , , , | 7 Comments

Watermarking Logos on Mac

Posted on June 23, 2011 by Ivan

Visual Watermark is a image watermarking tool for Mac and Windows. Since Mac-version is a much newer program, it lacks some features existing in the Window-version. One of them is the capability to add your own logotype stored as an image file.

Screen shot 2011-06-23 at 12.11.11 PM

Yesterday, we have added this capability to the Mac version too. An update is already on our website and is available as a free upgrade to all existing customers.

Download Link

To add an image to your watermark, click the Add Image button next to the Add Text button you’ve used previously. You will see an open-file dialog which allows to find and select your logo image file. Click OK and Visual Watermark will place your image onto a picture.

To change image size, use the Size slider in the Configuration window. You can select anything between 10% and 1600%. We use bilinear scaling for displaying purpose and best-quality bicubic scaling for watermarking purposes.

Please let me know what you think.

Posted in new feature, update, visual watermark for mac | Tagged | 4 Comments

Download Page Improvement

Posted on June 21, 2011 by Ivan

Our download link have been directly pointed to Visual Watermark setup file for 2 years. We decided to change this behavior a little bit and added a special webpage with downloading instructions.

Visual Watermark Download Page Improvement

Downloading still starts automatically but now you can use step-by-step instructions on how to download and install Visual Watermark on your computer. This page exists on both Mac and Windows.

Posted in website | 3 Comments
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