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.