About Justin VanAlstyne Expertise I can answer pretty much any question about Adobe Photoshop. I professional working knowledge of color correction, image manipulation, image optimization for the web, prepress preparation, color managment, and many other things.
Experience
Past/Present clients Marsh, Inc. (http://www.marsh.com), Home Properties (http://www.homeproperties.com), Rochester Womenade (http://www.rochesterwomenade.org), Ashtead Technology Rentals, Impel Corp. (http://www.impelcorp.com).
Question I have Adobe Photoshop 5.5 and 7 and I would like to find out how I can watermark my images with a watermark that is very unobtrusive, if possible invisible to the naked eye. I have visited the Digimarc website but I cannot use the "MyPictureMarc" software as I have more than 5,000 images. The ImageBridge is too expensive. Is there anything else I can do to watermark using Adobe?
Looking forward to your reply.
Kind regards,
Themis Halvantzi
Answer Themis-
I've got a great, FREE, solution for you. I'm just going to breeze through how to do it. If you have more in depth questions feel free to research them on the web or ask me.
What you need to do is get familiar with Actions. For my solution, I happened to use ImageReady (installs with Photoshop) becuase it has slightly more features for creating actions.
Start by creating a transparent PNG of the watermark graphic you want to use, in the size you want to appear on your images. I use my logo. Keep this PNG in a place that where it won't change locations (i.e. don't save it to your desktop and then move it later when you are done with this batch of images), because the action will record the exact location of the image, so if you try to run the action later and that image is missing, it will error on you.
I'll assume you aren't interested in resizing your images, or have already done so. If you haven't, you can record an action to resize portrait oriented images, and one for landscape oriented images, and you can set ImageReady to choose which way the action should go by using it's "conditional" feature.
Open one of your images. Go to the Actions palette and create a new action. It will automatically put into 'record' mode. While it's recording your actions, go to the File (or Image menu, I can't remember) menu and look for a command name "Place..." Locate your watermark graphic in the pop-up window, and choose how you'd like IR to place this graphic in your main image. I have one place command recorded for both the portrait and landscape type images so that my logo will go in the bottom right corner either vertically or horizontally depending on the orientation.
After this, I have an action that records the JPEG optimization settings I have choosen. Which it will use when it saves out the image. Now go to the carrot-like button on the top of the Actions palette, and go to "Create Droplet..." Then you will be able to set the save options and things. I have mine set so that it applys the JPEG optimzation and saves a copy of the image back to the original folder. If you want to create a copy of your original images, and run your droplet on those, you can set your droplet to just replace the files.
Then it will ask where you want to save your droplet. Now all you need to do is drag and drop a set of images onto this droplet application you just created. When you do this, IR will open and run your set of actions, which is to place the watermark, and/or resize, and save and close the image.
You are pretty much limitless in what you can automate using Actions. You can do most of this using Photoshop actions as well, just not the JPEG optimization and the conditional resizing stuff. When you create your watermark graphic, make sure it's on a transparent background, and I made my watermark graphic itself partially transparent so that's it not obnoxious on the final image.
Let me know how it goes. I appologize if everything doesn't work out exactly as I said it, I wrote the procedure from memory. I can email you my sample droplet, which you can open in IR and see my recorded actions. Just send me an email to junk2@jmvdigital.com
