Digimarc watermarks

[ron_hiner]

I'd love to have the ability to embed digimarc watermarks on my images when exporting web galleries.

This will allow searching for misappropriated images, and provide some protection from Photoshop's new content-aware-fill feature  which makes it pretty trivial to remove traditional watermarks.  And, in theory anyway, the digimarc watermark can't be removed -- unlike the image meta data.

To my knowledge,  photoshop is the only application that will add digimarc watermarks through a plug-in.  I'm surprised Lightroom doesn't do it.  

(I'm actually surprised no one has requested this!  I found only one hit in this site's search.)

[Luiz Muzzi]

Ron,
I myself had never heard of digimark watermark. I got to their site and became interested.
It would be nice to be able to apply it without Photoshop, through PM.
Regards,

-Luiz Muzzi

[ron_hiner]

Luiz - I learned about it through RC Concepcion's book Get Your Photography on the Web... (or something like that).   I put a very very few of my images up because they grow little feet and run all over the place.   I stumbled across one of my images on a magazine web site the other day, used without permission or credit -- I have not decided how strongly to point that out to them, but in the meanwhile, I want to digimarc anything new I put up on the web. 

 Digimarc won't protect images from being stolen, but it might help me find ones that have been stolen.

It's been built into photoshop for a long time (on the filter menu).   But now I finally see the value of it.

Ron

[ron_hiner]

Does anyone know if its possible to select a bunch photos from a contact  then run a photoshop action on them all? (is that what droplets are for?)

This would be a solution, I think.   But I've never looked into running bulk operations using photoshop when called from another application, such as PM.

[Hayo Baan]

Does anyone know if its possible to select a bunch photos from a contact  then run a photoshop action on them all? (is that what droplets are for?)

Yes, this is exactly what droplets are for. I use them regularly to run the same (sometimes complex) task on  a bunch of files. Works great!

Cheers,
    Hayo

[Luiz Muzzi]

Hayo,
Please, what would be the difference between sending the pictures to Photoshop using the character "E" in the keyboard and using the droplet?
TIA,

-Luiz Muzzi

[ron_hiner]

Hayo,
Please, what would be the difference between sending the pictures to Photoshop using the character "E" in the keyboard and using the droplet?
TIA,

-Luiz Muzzi

Luiz -  The E key sends your image to the default editor -- which may or may not be Photoshop.    Sending your image to a droplet opens your image in photoshop, excecutes the actions defined by the droplet.   In my case, (and I'm a total newbie to this) , my action consists (so far) of the following...
- resize image to the pixel dimensions I want for the web
- add canvas (for a frame)
- change color profile to sRGB
- apply copyright text to a new layer
- flatten image
 - add digimarc (not doing this just yet, still experimenting with actions/droplets 101)
-save as JPG
- close file.

It runs lightning fast!   Very impressive.   
I have much to learn, but this is a good start.

The key is to create an action in Photoshop, then create a droplet.   The droplet (I think) is a just a way to execute photoshop and a named action from outside of photoshop.

[Luiz Muzzi]

Hayo,
Thanks a lot for your help.
This droplet thing really does a lot of stuff at the same time with the files...
I wonder if one can use it with other softwares, like DPP, for instance.
Regards,

-Luiz Muzzi

[Hayo Baan]

Hi Luiz,

You're welcome and I'm glad it works so well for you too.

You won't be able to use droplets to automate DPP (or any other program for that matter) actions; they are a Photoshop-only thing.

I don't really know DPP, but if it is anything like Nikon's Capture NX, you should be able to create "settings" and batch process these on a (selection of) files. You'll have to do all this within DPP itself though; there is no interface that would allow PM to trigger this action.

It is not as neat as using droplets, but it works too.

Cheers,
    Hayo

[Luiz Muzzi]

Hayo,
Thanks again.
Could I ask what is your present workflow with PM, Capture NX and Photoshop? (I might as well have to change mine...)
Regards,

-Luiz Muzzi

[Hayo Baan]

Hi Luiz,

Perhaps we should start a separate thread for this 

The way I work is quite simple:

• Shoot RAW with the Camera set to a standard profile with a bit of extra saturation and sharpening quite high. This I do to be able to judge on-the-camera whether or not my images are Ok (and sharp)
• PM to ingest my images (to two different locations, files get renamed and get a base set of IPTC copyright info)
• PM to cull the images
• Batch run a base set of image settings on the raw files in Capture NX, based on the content of the images (e.g. Landscape, Wildlife) — This step would be similar if you used e.g. Lightroom or ACR)
• Refine selection and determine selected, alternative, and trash images, add ratings for selected images
• Fine tune individual images in Capture NX and/or other software (PhotoMatix Pro, Photoshop, etc.)
• Repeat until happy with final selection

My selection/culling works as follows: trash pictures or real duplicates get tagged (these get really deleted afterwards), selected images and alternatives get temporarily colour coded. The definitely selected ones get a star rating. This is refined until I have the final selection. I then delete the tagged files and remove the temporary colour coding. The images with a rating are my "selected" images, the ones without a rating are alternatives which I store in a separate location.
Selected images then get a colour label based on their "function": 1=Portfolio, 2=Portfolio Series, 5=Input file (e.g. further edited in Photoshop or used as part of an HDR or Panorama). Note the images labelled as Input file are hidden by default in PM so I only see the result images (as I use Capture NX, my NEFs already show the edit result so I don't need to create a tiff for those).

Hope this helps,
    Hayo

[Luiz Muzzi]

Thanks a lot for your help...
And you're right...we should start a new thread on that. 
I will do it and I will name it "What is your workflow with PM?" in the General Discussion section.
regards,

-Luiz Muzzi