Which is better?

[SenorNikonMan]

I am working on a watermark but I'm not sure which of these versions I like better. What do you guys (and gals) think?

Light emobssing:


Medium embossing:


Heavy embossing:

[jgredline]

Where do u plan on placing it? .Not in the middle I hope.

[DrRoebuck]

You should make it smaller, and you should smooth out the text.

[GB1]

The top one is least intrusive. But they're all intrusive in the middle there, sort of ruins the experience of viewing the photograph, imo.

Watermarking is a tough issue: nobody wants their work stolen, but digimarc is expensive. If you put the watermark at the bottom it can be cropped out, but putting it in the middle seems to negate the purpose of displaying the work. Don't know what to say..

G

[SenorNikonMan]

Where do u plan on placing it? .Not in the middle I hope.

Actually yes. As GB1 mentioned, putting it close to the edges makes it easy to crop out. I was leaning towards the first one, because it is less intrusive, but somebody else told me that they preferred the third one and that is why I wanted to get more opinions.

I think I'll try a smaller version as DrRoebuck suggested. As for smoothing out the text, I don't know how to do that.

I'd rather not have to use a watermark at all, but what do I do when people are asking to see a large enough version to see more detail but I don't want them to copy, paste and print it? Any other suggestions?

[jgredline]

I agree with GB1 totally on this and I can certainly see your point...Perhaps if you have a website, you can convert the pics over to flash and upload them..Atleast that way they look good and very hard to rob. Otherwise the watermark makes the pics look very unattractive.

[SenorNikonMan]

Thanks for the input everybody. I'm going to go with the first version as it seems to be the lesser (or would that be least?) of three evils right now. As for the flash idea, I don't know how to go about doing that and I don't think my website allows me to upload flash images anyway. I could be wrong of course.

BTW, my photo editing software doesn't seem to let me put the watermark anyplace but the center. So even if I did want to put it elsewhere, I couldn't.

[GB1]

Hey fellows - There is a way to display in Flash only. It's not foolproof protection, but it does make it hard(er) for someone to download them.

Check this out .. I'm currently creating a personal site with it:

http://www.flashnifties.com/

[freygr]

If some one is going to steal it doesn't mater what you do unless you have an ugly water mark in the middle of the photo. The first one is by far the best of the three water mark. You should look at Watermark Professional.

[SenorNikonMan]

Hey fellows - There is a way to display in Flash only. It's not foolproof protection, but it does make it hard(er) for someone to download them.

Check this out .. I'm currently creating a personal site with it:

http://www.flashnifties.com/

Wow, that looks very impressive! I'd love to see your site when it's done. Can you vary the sizes of the larger images or are they the same sizes as in the demos?

[SmartWombat]

Agencies like fotolibra put their watermark smack in the centre.
Then if you're serious about evaluating/buying the image, you need an account, and their software, and access to the images is tracked.

It's always a compromise between protection, and viewing the images.

[GB1]

Wow, that looks very impressive! I'd love to see your site when it's done. Can you vary the sizes of the larger images or are they the same sizes as in the demos?

The way I used the library, you can't vary them. The size of the images will be up to their full size, but will shrink if the flash frame or browser windows size is smaller. Not sure if there's any other way. I chatted with the developer, he didn't mention any workaround.

A lot of nice things about Flash Nifties, but two downsides:

1) all thumbnails are the exact same size and dimensions, which can lead to clipping
2) it creates the thumbs from the full sized images. So, that means that it must DL the full images before you see the thumbs, which is slow.

I will post the link to the site (hopefully ) soon.

[MarcusK]

Well a flash website will sure take care of protection... from the average user....

And flash objects are not that difficult since flash has templates you can use for photo-galleries which will make the watermark issue less intrusive and work fine!

The Nifties are very interesting GB, and they sure make life easier instead of having to do it yourself!

From the 3 and at the risk of sounding redundant... I'll go with the first!

Marc

[DrRoebuck]

As for smoothing out the text, I don't know how to do that.

Are you using Photoshop to place the watermark? If so, you can choose font-smoothing options with the Character palette.