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Digital photography has made sharing photos easy -- sometimes too easy. Work posted to the Web by lens-slingers can be misappropriated with abandon by the naive as well as the nefarious.
One way shutterbugs try to protect their images is by watermarking them. A watermark is a logo, legend or other sign superimposed on a photo to identify its origin.
Until recently, users of iPhoto, the photo management application included with every new Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) computer, had to resort to external programs to watermark their images. That's changed, though, with the release of Impression from Blue Crowbar Software, of Ghent, Belgium.
Stay-at-Home Watermarking
Impression (US$14.25) is a plug-in. It allows watermarks to be placed on images from within iPhoto '08 or '09 without leaving the program.
Making Impression a plug-in rather than a standalone program can improve a photographer's workflow when working with iPhoto, according to Blue Crowbar founder Steven Vandeweghe.
"The biggest advantage is that the plug-in immediately imports the watermarked photo back into iPhoto so you continue working with it, making some more adjustments or resizing it before you export it," he told MacNewsWorld.
Snapshots branded with Impression aren't altered. The program watermarks a copy of the original image and automatically imports it into iPhoto.
Bulk Handler
Bulk photo handlers will appreciate the software's ability to watermark photos in batches with a single click.
Impression will create watermarks from Photoshop (PSD) or PNG images, as well as from text in RTF files. What's more, the font and text color from the RTF is preserved in the watermark.
Watermarks can be added to any image format supported by iPhoto -- even RAW files, which are commonly shot with high-end digital cameras. Once the RAW photo is watermarked, however, it's imported into iPhoto as a high-quality JPG file.
Other features include horizontal or vertical placement of the marks and control over their transparency, position and margin.
Missing iPhoto Feature
The idea for Impression, Vandeweghe said, was spawned from an earlier iPhoto plug-in he authored, iPhoto2Twitter.
"One of the things that I did in that plug-in is, when you use it as an unregistered trial version, it prints a small watermark on the photo that you tweeted," he explained.
"One of my customers then wrote me saying that this is what he thinks is a missing feature in iPhoto," he continued. "I looked around on Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), and I found lots of people asking about watermarking in iPhoto on forums and such. So I started working on it."
For the most part, Vandeweghe sees the audience for Impression to lie outside the professional photography market.
"I don't have any real statistics, of course, but I think that professional photographers are more likely to use something like Aperture, which already has a watermarking feature," he observed.
"I think my program is more targeted towards either advanced amateurs, but also towards professional people who are not photographers," he continued. "I'm seeing a lot of sales coming from business people who are not photographers, but that are posting their photos on the Web in a professional way."
Determined Remain Undeterred
Although watermarking images raises a red flag to innocent photo filchers, its protective benefits are limited.
"It discourages people who won't take the time to either crop it out -- if it's at the edge of the image -- or Photoshop it out if its smack in the middle of it," David D. Busch, a Revenna, Ohio-based author of digital photography books, told MacNewsWorld.
"Then you have a third group of people who really don't care who the image belongs to and they'll publish it with your watermark on it anyway," he added.
"It's like copy-protection was on programs," he maintained. "It slows down or makes it inconvenient for honest or semi-honest people, but it doesn't really stop the determined thief."
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