Anyone use a watermarking service?

[OrionGirl]

Just curious. Don't have many of my own pics out there, more looking at work. There are a few different services available, and I'm not sure what's good and what's not--price wise, ease of use, effect? Feel like I'm trying to buy a car for the first time...

 

[FL Knifemaker]

OG,

Are you interested in watermarking images on the web or film photos???

 

[OrionGirl]

On the web.

 

[FL Knifemaker]

Just spoke to my web guy..........I thought it could be done simply in Photoshop. I didn't realize you have to register with a company that provides the service, etc.! I know people that have used Digimark (through the link from Adobe) and have been very happy with the service.

 

[OrionGirl]

That's the company I'm looking at right now. I was wondering if there were any others...

 

[geoffgarcia]

not that its any of my business, but why do you want to do this?

 

[OrionGirl]

To secure images posted on my work website. Some are considered public property (employees taking pictures with department cameras of department work), but a few are commissioned work that should be secured.

 

[FL Knifemaker]

:idea2:

If the images you post are all 100K and say 600 pixels wide or less, I can't see why you would have to use a watermark service. If someone enlarges the image it's going to degrade anyway. If they reduce it, you won't loose the watermark??? I could see watermarking hi res images like wallpaper shots or maybe blueprints or schematics. Other than that why not just make a "property of" layer in photoshop and apply it yourself without any of the registration hassles and cost???

 

[geoffgarcia]

...why not just make a "property of" layer in photoshop and apply it yourself without any of the registration hassles and cost???

that wouldn't be enough...

To secure images ... a few are commissioned works that should be secured.

 

[OrionGirl]

For most of the pics, that's what I have done. They are decent within the layout, but if you try to blow them up, they pixellate...badly. Spent quite sometime working on that one. The problems is those commissioned works--part of the contract outlines that we will protect the image from unauthorized use--and I've already found that images that can't be blown up and look good are being tiled and set as backgrounds. Not cool. Contacting the webmaster for those sites has been less than rewarding, so I'd like to have an option like the Digimark watermarking--it generates a trackable imprint in the file, citing copyrights.