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How to Improve Your Watermark Protection

Posted on August 15, 2011 by Ivan Ross

All of us know that the best way to protect your digital photos on the Internet is by watermarking them, but sometimes to place the watermark on the photos is not enough to secure your photos. For example, look at these pictures.

How to improve watermarking - original photo
Original photo with a small watermark in the center
How to improve watermark security - watermark removed
We removed the watermark but added significant watermark footprint

We removed the watermark using photo editing software. Remaining defects on the restored picture are so invisible that the photo can be easily stolen.

Does it mean that watermarks in general are insecure? Continue reading →

Posted in tutorial, watermark | 7 Comments

Visual Watermark for Mac Update 1

Posted on August 13, 2011 by Ivan Ross

Hello, I’m happy to announce the first update for Visual Watermark for Mac. It features 5 new features.

Auto-scaled watermarks

This feature allows watermarking landscape, portrait and cropped photos at once. If the watermark is too big to fit into a photo, Visual Watermark will scale it down to look similar on all photos.

Auto scale feature

Watermark Preview

New version of our watermark software shows watermark previews inside photo thumbnails. It allows to check the watermark is aligned properly on all photos and correct the placement if it doesn’t.

Drag Photos Directly to the Program

We’re tired of the standard open file dialog. Now, you can simply drag your photos directly to the program, and it will select them for watermarking automatically. You can even drag an iPhoto album to the program!

Dragging photos from iPhoto app

Watermark Templates

Visual Watermark saves your watermark template to the disc when you quit the program. When you start Visual Watermark to watermark more photos, you don’t need to create watermark template from scratch anymore.

These four features above turn Visual Watermark into a “drag-n-click” tool for watermarking photos.

Improved Activation

Yes, we heard your complaints about cumbersome activation process. Now, it is much more straightforward.

Thank you so much for pointing us to problems and suggesting new feature. I appreciate your help!

P.S. This update is free to all our customers – download the program and replace your current copy. 

Posted in update, visual watermark for mac, watermark software | 2 Comments

Figuring Small Business/Self-employed Taxes

Posted on August 2, 2011 by Ivan Ross
Figuring small business/self-employed taxes
Copyright © 2008 kozumel

As a self-employed artist, or photographer, you have to pay an ordinary income tax as everybody else does and additional “self-employment” tax which does not exist for people living on a wage.

Self-employment tax

Self-employment tax is social security contributions for a photographer/artist. Normally, when you are employed by someone else, the employer is responsible for these payments. However, when you are a freelancer, you must pay the full amount yourself. Continue reading →

Posted in business, legal, taxes | 1 Comment

Personal Finances of a Self-Employed

Posted on July 25, 2011 by Ivan Ross
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 Ross

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 Ross

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 Ross

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 Ross
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 Ross

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 Ross

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
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