Protecting yourself: Watermarking photos

Last week, after the mess that happened with the NDSC poster contest, lots of people have wondered what they can do to protect themselves from cyber creeps like those who stole the pictures off the NDSC website.

I wrote a tutorial on my favorite forum about watermarking, and am posting it here as well.

..........................................

Other than NOT posting pictures, the only way to protect your pictures from crap like this is to make sure you have them watermarked! HOWEVER, DO NOT put your watermark down in a corner, or any other place that it can be cropped out. You need to put it right smack dab across the middle of your picture. Then, once you have your watermark on there, make sure you EMBED it into the picture!

So, your picture would now look something like this:

Normally I make my watermarks semi-transparent, like the one in the top picture. You can also do it a very basic one like the second picture.

There are a couple different ways watermark your picture. Some photo editing programs have a "watermark" action. If yours doesn't, or if you're not sure where to find it, follow these steps for an alternative:

1) Make a text box, place it where you want on the picture

2) Highlight the text, and set the translucency level to your liking.

3) Now "Save as" and rename the picture.

4) Embed the text into the picture. This means you're making the text box and the picture into all one item. If you forget to "save as", you will forever have this text box on your picture, so if this is your only copy of the picture, you've just wrecked it! Doing a "save as"means you're creating a new version of the original.

All programs are a little different. If you can't find where to perform a certain action, use your program's "help" index to find it.

Bethany has another tutorial on her blog, and has links to a couple online photo editing sites if you don't have one on your own computer.