Protect your photos online

Here’s a quick guide to creating a digital watermark in Paint Shop Pro Photo X2. You can easily adapt it for any other photo editor.

1 Open up the image for watermarking and add your watermark notice using the text tool. Choose a bold sans serif font like Arial Black. To get the copyright © symbol hold down alt and type 0169 on your numeric keypad.

2 Whatever colour you make the notice, (mine is white) it’s going to blend in on some backgrounds, so add a drop shadow to differentiate it. First duplicate the Vector 1 layer containing the copyright text by right-clicking and selecting Duplicate from the context menu. Then select Effects, 3D Effects, Drop Shadow and click OK in the alert box to rasterize the copied text layer. Adjust the drop shadow to your liking and click OK to apply it.

3 Now you can click the layer visibility button (the eye icon) in the Layers palette for the vector 1 type layer to turn it off – it’s only there should you need to go back and edit the text, in which case you’ll need to do step 2 again.

4 Finally, drag the opacity slider in the layers palette to reduce the visibility of the copyright notice; around 30 per cent makes it visible enough to be seen without being too intrusive.

Invisible watermarking
If you’re not keen on the idea of having a visible watermark on your photos, how about one you can’t see?

An invisible digital watermark doesn’t visibly mark your photos and doesn’t therefore render them unusable to copyright infringers.

What it does do is identify them as yours in the event of an infringement occurring and a dispute arising. It also means you can search and detect unauthorised use of your images on the web.

Digimarc is mainly used by imaging professionals – photographers, photo libraries and the like. It uses steganography (from Greek, meaning covered writing), a technique for securing messages by hiding them within other content.

Watermarks can be embedded using a desktop application, a Photoshop plug-in or on the fly within a content management system.

Digimarc watermarking is pretty robust and survives image-editing processes, so even if your image is cropped, adjusted, filtered, otherwise manipulated or used in a derivative work, the watermark remains intact.

Digimarc’s Professional service is sold on a licensing basis, prices start at $79 (around £50) for a 1,000-image licence.

The application will tell you if a Digimarc watermark is present in an image and (with a subscription) allows you to embed watermarks.

Clearly, no-one has the time or inclination to trawl the web looking for unauthorised use of their photos and, unless your photos are particularly desirable, you’re unlikely to make chance discoveries of unlawful use.

With its more expensive 5,000-image licence Digimarc includes its image tracking service, which trawls the web searching for your unique watermark and provides regular reports on usage of your images on the web.