It doesn’t matter where you get your digital images, be it from a digital camera a film camera and you scan the prints or you scan the negatives. It doesn’t matter at sometime or another you will have need to protect your images and to assert you copyright of those images. For a lot of people that is when they create an online photo gallery to share their images with the rest of the world for others it is when making them available to clients. It doesn’t matter how you work with and share your images with others you want to make sure that your images are as protected as possible. One way you have to do this is by simply making the images small and low resolution. However, there are ways around this. You can resize them up in a program like Photoshop in 10% increments and quite easily end up with an image that will print pretty well. There are also several programs on the market that can resize small low resolution images up to print resolution and more.

 

The only way to make your images unviable for those that want to use them without permission and/or payment is to place a copyright notice on them. The funny thing is many photo editing programs don’t provide a way to do this. Sure in something like Adobe Photoshop you can use the text tool to put a copyright notice on the image, but do you really want to do this with 100 images or even 20 or 30? I don’t. I want to be able to apply my copyright notice to them in a batch process so that I have to do as little work as possible. I also want to have options for my copyright notice. I want more than just plain boring text. The more complex you make your copyright on your image the harder it is to clone it out. It is also important to make I large enough that it wouldn’t be worth cropping it out either. But, at the same time you want your image to show through.

 

So what is one to do? Well, since the photo editing manufacturers don’t seem to be willing to step up to the plate we once again have to turn to third parties. Now in the third party world there are commercial and there are shareware programs. There are even some that for a fee can place an invisible watermark on your image so that it can’t be seen but can be detected. Adobe Photoshop comes with such a plug-in. The problem is that these cost a lot of money and to me an invisible watermark doesn’t do anything to keep people from printing and unless you can track down the violators to go after them legally these types of invisible watermarks are worthless in my book. No what you want is something that is clearly seen and in their face. You want your image to be seen, but you want the copyright notice to be seen as well. After looking at several products I decided on PhotoWatermark Professional. This is a shareware program which means you can download it and try it out before you buy it and when you decide to buy it the fee is reasonable and fair.

 

I like PhotoWatermark Professional because it has a good clean interface, but it allows for a lot of power and has lots of options. Besides being able to place simple text with effects like drop shadows and bevels on your image, it allows you to ghost text and images too meaning that they are see through. For text you control the font, size, color, transparency and even special effects like bevels and the like. For images you can create a really spiffy copyright image in say Photoshop, complete with a transparent background and then have PhotoWatermark Professional place this on your images. You also have complete control of where the text and images are placed on your images and much more.

 

But, what is most important is that PhotoWatermark Professional can apply your copyright, watermark, etc. to your images through batch processing. Meaning once you get your watermark or copyright text or image setup it can apply it to one image or a thousand images, all with very little effort from the user.

You can batch process folders and subfolders, you can apply multiple watermarks, you can use bitmap images or vector images for your watermark images, text can have soft shadows, 3D shadows, inner shadows and more. You can also watermark your images using information from the images EXIF and/or IPTC information in the file, things like shutter speed, ISO and more.

 

PhotoWatermark Professional is just an incredible program. It is easy to use, flexible and powerful and most importantly it fills a need that companies like Adobe have left empty. Instead of offers these kinds of features in Adobe Photoshop they give you a plug-in that costs a lot of money and that doesn’t do much to help protect your images.

• Batch processing folders, and if you wish, its subfolders at the same time.
• Multiple watermarks of any complexity.
• When you set a percentage for a watermark, it will be automatically size to your picture.
• Text can have outline, soft shadow, 3D shadow, inner-shadow, emboss, engrave, gradient or texture fill.
• Supports drawing watermarks of line, box, ellipse and polygon which can also have gradient or texture fill.
• You can create multiple watermark files for different purposes and switch between them instantly.
• You can save your favorite watermarks in a watermark library and use them later.
• Supports watermarking photos with image data (e.g. EXIF, IPTC, file information).
• Watermarking pictures with someone's age.
• Supports automatically updated watermarks such as date time, age, file info, auto number and more.
• Support scalable vector watermarks without loosing quality.
• Supports symbols (e.g. ©, ®, etc.) in all languages.
• Supports JPEG, TIF, GIF, Bitmap, PNG, and digital camera raw files.
• Supports rename template.
• Live hints for beginners.
• Green program: Everything is in a single folder.
• Batch: One step to process large number of photos (all files in a folder and also in its subfolders at the same time) including combinations of:
  • Batch watermarking.
  • Batch renaming: name files either in order or using EXIF date and time picture taken.
  • Batch resizing: choose among predefined and custom sizes using one of the 11 re-sampling filters.
  • Batch converting: choose among JPEG, TIFF, Bitmap, GIF, PNG and JPEG 2000.
  • Batch enhancing: drop shadow, border, rotate, sharpen or soften, change canvas and colors, etc.
  • Batch cropping: define a crop window for each picture or load the predefined window for all pictures and they will be cropped on your wish.
  • Batch framing: decorate your pictures with various frames.
• Rich watermark types: You can have mixture of line, box, ellipse, polygon, text, image, age, image file info, EXIF table, date time picture take, camera setting, camera model, today's date and time, sequence number, and frame watermarks.
• Fantastic text styles: A variety of text styles including angle, outline, gradient or texture fill, shadow, Shadow3D, inner-shadow, emboss and engrave.
• Most robust text watermarks: Text watermarks support multiple lines, symbols (e.g. copyright), image file information, EXIF and IPTC tags which can be updated automatically with each picture.
• Automatic watermarks: Image file info, Date time picture taken, EXIF table, Age, Camera model, Camera settings, Sequence number, Frame.
• Image manipulations: A variety of image effects for image watermarks: emboss, tile, twist etc.
• Smooth watermark rendering.
• Adjustable transparency setting: Each watermark can have its own transparency level between 0 and 100. 0 means totally opaque and 100 means totally transparent.
• Automatic watermark size: Automatically size watermark to cover a certain percent of your image if you specify watermark size in percent.
• Automatic watermark position: Automatically position your watermarks relative to the border of your images if you specify watermark auto position.
• Paste bitmap or Windows Meta image from clipboard.
• High quality scalable vector watermarks.
• Watermark manager: Maximize your creativity; create multiple watermark files for different purposes.
• What you see is what you get interface.
• Explorer-style folder tree view and file list view.
• Common image file support: Load and save JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, BITMAP and JPEG2000. Load digital camera raw files.
• Watermark animated GIF and multiple page TIFFs.
• Live hints for beginner to start.