Ever since I started uploading photos onto the Internet I needed a way of 'protecting' my images. I could choose to upload a very small photo, with terrible JPEG artifact, but that's not the way you want to be remembered. Especially today. Today we have the bandwidth and the online storage to upload large images, so why not do that.
If you don't want that other people (or companies) to (financially) benefit from your hard work (1, 2, 3), you may want to 'tag' your photos. Just to make sure who created the original image.
When you shoot lot's of photos and share them with others on the Internet, you don't want to manipulate each photo. You would want to automate this.
Thankfully, there are numerous programs out there that can do such a thing. Some are free (free as in speech, and free as in beer), and others are commercially available.
In the last couple of months I mainly used Bordermaker. Mainly because it was free AND it ran on OSX. But several things annoyed me about those (free) programs;
- The final JPEG result was 'bad'. Lot's of artefacts.
- No (decent) way of getting the EXIF info in the final image.
- No OSX version of the software.
- Not the freedom you really wanted in adding frames or watermarks to an image.
In my current workflow, I use Adobe Photoshop for tuning my images (the things too complex for Lightroom). And Photoshop has the possiblity of defining actions.
Actions are like macro's you use in Microsoft Office. You record them, save them and re-use them.
In the past I looked into this, but somehow I missed an easy way (well, i couldn't find it) of putting text in the lower right corner of an image. until I found out that use should use 'Align Layers' to do that.
This resulted in the following set of actions;
- Photoshop droplet which watermarked regular photos with a black border and auto-saved them to a directory.
- Photoshop droplet which watermarked panoramic photos (the bigger the more beautiful those usually are) with a black border and autosaved them to a directory
- Two actions (regular and panoramic photos) for use within Photoshop (so no auto save).
Small description of the process used;
- File resize to max number of pixels using File -> Automate -> Fit Image
- Resize canvas (relative, 4 pixels in both directions, expand from the center, background white)
- Resize canvas (relative, 36 pixels in both directions, expand from the center, background black)
- Created a layer with the watermarking text
- Align the layers on the right, and bottom (you need to select all layers to do so)
- Free Transform (relative, minus the pixels on the X en Y axis) to position your text (or watermarking image)
- Save as (if necessary).
The Actions can be downloaded here <actionsredelijkheidcomatn.zip> (the watermarking text reflect my own website. Just change it).
B.t.w. those Photoshop droplets can be used in the Lightroom export function.
Thanks to Gerard Henninger for providing a starting point for this action.
UPDATE: Well, I've learned some new 'tricks' in the mean time. The new Photoshop CS3 Watermarking actions won't touch the original image / layers and works with snapshots. So you can always go back to your original image.
The individual steps in an action can be tweaked by double-clicking the appropriate step while holding the option key on a Mac. I don't know the Windows equivalent. Probably the Alt or CTRL key.
UPDATE 2: The Adobe Photoshop CS3 watermarking action is NOT CS4 compatible ("javascript code is missing" error). The problem is the fit image (script) action-part. 'Just' replace that part of the action with the new 'Fit image' automated action and you should be good to go.
I will put up a new zip file with the same actions suited for CS4 soon.
UPDATE 3: I've updated the watermarking action. This one works with CS4.