Swashbuckling with Modern Pirates (Part III)

Alright, so I've talked about digital theft, why it sucks, and how to stop it.  I've been relying pretty heavily on Gimp for this because a) it's free and b) it's a lot more powerful than some of the other free photo programs out there, such as Google's Picassa.  However, if you're not interested in doing particularly advanced things with your photos, Picassa will work just fine and, in fact, can handle resizing and watermarking.  While there are a lot of things you can't do in Picassa, such as dodging and burning (or, at least I haven't discovered how), it's an extremely user friendly program.  And, like Gimp, it's free!  Bonus.  So, how do you resize and watermark in Picassa?

First, double-click the photo you're trying to alter.  This will bring up a window with the photo, a toolbar to the right with basic fixes etc., and a toolbar on the bottom.  Now that you've selected the photo, click CTRL+Shift+S.  This will bring up a dialog box.  First, select the folder you want to save the new image to in the "Export Location" window.  I also like to set the image quality to "Maximum" in the drop down menu halfway down the dialog box, but for a smaller file you might want to reduce the image quality.  Next, you can either resize by clicking the "Resize to:" button and sliding the bar or you can watermark the image by clicking the "Add watermark" button and typing whatever you want your watermark to say in the box below.  I suppose you could do both at the same time, though I'm not sure why you would... Anyhow, the only thing left to do at this point is to click the "Export" button.  Note, your original image is unaltered and in its original folder.  Nice and easy, right?  The only problem is, you have a lot less control over the color, location, etc. of the watermark than you would in a program such as Gimp.  As you can see below, the watermark simply appears in white at the bottom of the image.  The second example here shows a resized image. 

This picture shows the mermaid statue in the Old Town Square in Warsaw, Poland.  The mermaid is the symbol of warsaw, and the bronze sculpture dates to 1855.  The town square has been reconstructed more than once, most notably after its destruction during World War II, and the statue, which survived the war, was relocated to the center of the square.

Swashbuckling with Modern Pirates (Part II)

As I mentioned in my last post, resizing photographs is a great way to protect digital images from theft.  However, it's by no means the only method, and there obviously times when a tiny photograph just won't do.  Another option is watermarking the images--that is, superimposing a semi-transparent word or image on your photograph (your name being one easy choice).  With some digital galleries (such as imagekind--see my link to my imagekind gallery on the left), you can opt to have the images watermarked upon upload.  However, if you're sharing on a social networking site or your own website, you probably won't have that option. I've been spoiled by sites that do the watermarking for me, and less careful than I probably should be about uploading photos without a watermark to Facebook.  So, I figured it was about time to learn to watermark my own images. 

So, why resize an image when you can just stick a watermark on it and let everyone see your work in all of its full-sized glory?  Well, as you can see below, the watermark is a bit distracting, and some might argue it detracts too much from the beauty of your image.  Assuming that's a risk you're willing to take in order to have a full-sized picture, however, why not just use one of the many handy and free watermarking websites that can be found with a quick Google search?  For me, there are two advantages to watermarking your own work.  First, if you're a paranoid freak like I am, you probably don't want to just upload your photos to any old website--after all, the whole point of going through this is to protect your images, right?  If you're not paranoid, you may still be interested in the added level of control you get from watermarking your own work--you can decide what your watermark says, where it appears on the photo (thereby at least reducing some of the concerns about how distracting the watermark is), the color of the watermark, and how transparent you want it to be.  So, if you're convinced that watermarking is worthwhile, read on, my friend.

In tackling this issue,  ran across a bunch of different explanations and methods of watermarking your images.  The level of complexity varied, but in general I didn't find any of the methods to be quite as easy as my cheater way of doing it.  Yes, I cheated.  What can I say?  It seemed like a lot of the tutorials were making things more complicated than they needed to be.  If you'd like to cheat as well, I'll fill you in on my secret: a simple text box is your friend.  You don't need layers to create a watermark; just open your image, select "text box" from the toolbar on the left (this should load automatically when you open Gimp), and click on the image to create a text box.  You can type whatever you want to watermark your image with in the box, then play around with the color, resize the box, move the box around on the photo, change the font size and style, and so forth until you're happy with the watermark.  Voila!  Let me reiterate a point I made in my last post, though--do NOT save over the original image! Make sure you leave the original unaltered, and save the watermarked image as a copy.  Otherwise you will be very sad when you go to print your beautiful photo and it has a big ugly watermark on it.  Which is the idea for digital pirates, of course!  Now, we'll see if my cheating comes back to bite me when I tackle the issue of resizing and watermarking in batches in my next post. 

This photograph of the Charles Bridge in Prague was taken in December 2010 from the top of the tower on the Old Town side of the river.  Prague is one of the most stunningly beautiful places I've ever been and, though it's freezing in the winter (as you might imagine), the snow on the bridge and roof tops made the city particularly lovely.  I converted this photograph to sepia tone to capture the old world feeling of the city. 

Swashbuckling with Modern Pirates (Part I)

From my perspective, one of the more exciting aspects of modern photography is the ability to quickly and easily share photos via the magic of the internet.  It's also a bit frightening.  Don't get me wrong--I don't think anyone (with the possible exception of my mother) wants to steal a picture of me making funny faces while I drink Belgian beer in an unremarkable restaurant.  I also suspect that, for the most part, if someone were inclined to swipe a photo or two, it would most likely be to use as a desktop background or some other innocuous purpose.  However, as I've started trying to sell my photographs (I have to fund my hobby somehow, after all), I've been advised by multiple sources that, in order to protect myself from piracy, I need to take some defensive action.  Rather than learning the art of swordplay, I've been researching how to watermark or resize images.  I've provided an examples of resizing here--the first photos on this blog, incidentally.  Watermarking will be covered in "Swashbuckling with Modern Pirates (PartII)".  Being a poor, unemployed, recent graduate student, I am not really in a position to spend oodles of cash on editing software for my photographs--as such, I've been learning to use Gimp (http://www.gimp.org/) for my editing needs.  More on editing software later.

So, what's up with this resizing business?  A quick Google search for "resize photos" will turn up hundreds of websites offering to quickly and easily resize your images.  However, as part of this whole learning to do things myself thing, I've read a fantastic tutorial on how to resize images in Gimp (http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Lite_Quickies/).  You can see the results below.  So, I've explained why resize--to make it more difficult for some malicious person to come along and steal your hard work (and, by the way, this is also a handy trick if your photo is too large to send via e-mail or you're working on a website and you're not happy with how long an image takes to load).  But I haven't yet explained how/why it solves the theft issue.  So, here goes.

You probably already know that when you buy a new digital camera, one of the important specs you will want to consider is the megapixel resolution, with a higher megapixel resolution resulting in a higher quality image.  What you may not know is why megapixels matter.  In simple terms, a digital image is composed of a bunch of squares of color, or pixels.  However, each pixel contains only one color.  So, you can easily imagine that the size and number of pixels in the image will drastically change the quality of the image--where you have a large number of very small squares, the squares will appear to blend seamlessly, and you will see the sum of the squares as an image; where you have a small number of large squares of color (pixels), your eye will detect the squares, and the image will look blocky (a very technical term here, obviously).  Now, thinking back to high school geometry for a moment, to find the area of a rectangle, we multiply length x width, right?  Typically pixels in an image are measured per inch, so to find the pixels per inch, we multiply the number of pixels across that inch by the number of pixels down--the number of pixels in the whole image can then be calculated by multiplying the pixels per inch by the number of inches in the photo.  The term megapixel just means one million pixels--so a six megapixel camera will produce an image with 6 million pixels (of course, there is a lot more nuance to be discussed here, and different settings on cameras will produce different resolutions, but hopefully this discussion is sufficient to establish why pixels matter).  Generally, the larger you want your print/digital image to be, the more (and smaller) pixels you need to hide the fact that the image is really just made of a bunch of squares of color.

That's all well and good, but at this point I'm sure you're wondering how all of this talk of pixels relates to the issue at hand--that of how to prevent the theft of digital images.  Well, if I use my 6.1 megapixel camera to take a photograph and I slap that photograph online without resizing the image, you can easily download the image and produce a print that is just as high quality as the one I could print myself.  However, if I resize the photo by reducing the number of pixels, I'm throwing away some of the information in the photograph so that if you try to print the photo, you will end up with an ugly, blocky image instead of a nice, seamless, high quality image.  Of course, this also limits the size of the image I can post on the website without it starting to look blocky.  I'll close with a word to the wise: as a general rule of thumb, I NEVER alter my original images--and this is especially important for resizing.  Always save a copy of the image--if you save only the resized images, you cannot just go back and add those pixels you threw away.  They are gone forever.  I strongly recommend saving a copy and resizing the copy.  One final note: the dimensions you ultimately decide on (i.e. how small you resize the image) is entirely up to you--the smaller you make it, the worse it will look if someone tries to steal and enlarge the image.  However, you still want your photo to look good online, right?  So play around with the dimensions and find what works best for your needs.  Happy swashbuckling!

Just to give you an idea, this photo is 500x750 pixels, resized from 2048x3072.  The photograph was taken from a window in the Louvre in November 2004 at sunset. 

And then there was a blog...

I should probably begin by making clear that I am a bit of a geek.  In spite of my extreme geekdom, however, this is my first foray into the wonderful world of blogging.  I suppose I'm a bit behind on my internet adventures.  As you'll learn if I can ever figure out how to complete my "About Me" section, I've been interested in photography since I was about 16, and captivated by beautiful images for as long as I can remember.  More recently, I've been trekking around Europe and accumulating a healthy collection of photographs, which I've started posting at http://www.imagekind.com/MemberProfile.aspx?MID=e536fcfd-6031-4a9c-8814-025245913dc3.  I've decided that the time has come to stop hiding my photographs on my hard drive, and my brilliant uncle suggested that I start a blog.  So, here we are.  I can only hope that you'll be kind enough to share your thoughts on my work.