Watermarking Photographs
November 18, 2009 | Filed Under News, Photography
Photography has gotten a lot easier these days with digital cameras and their auto settings and I’ve seen people carry around digital SLRs instead of old point and shoots more and more. When I took a black and white film photography class, the countless hours I spent in the darkroom developing film, developing prints, and printing prints made me realize how much more I’d rather work in the digital photography format than with film; though some found the darkroom therapeutic, I did not.
As with film photography, I don’t “print” my photos as-is, but with adjustments. The camera never captures what the eyes truly see; Ansel Adams did a lot of dodging and burning on his photographs.
My post-processing workflow involves reviewing and selecting photos, color and lighting adjustments, captioning and keywording/tagging. and publishing. And then there’s the time spent taking the photograph with consideration for composition and lighting. This is not just for my digital SLR photographs, but I do the same with my point and shoot photographs.
So when someone downloaded my photographs from Flickr and included them in their own photo album passing them of as their own (albeit unintentionally), I felt as if the time I spent on my photos had been stolen, too.
I haven’t been a fan of watermarking because it also affects the photograph’s imagery, but I’ve reluctantly turned to it. In a perfect world, everyone would check to see if it would be okay to use photographs (or any other work of others) before doing so, but it’s unfortunate that everyone assumes that if you can get it on the web, you can do whatever you want with it. I’ve seen lifted photos on Facebook and Evite and they even have copyright watermarks on them and I’m quite certain that the person didn’t ask for permission first. It’s not just about attribution, but also what the photo is associated with. I’ve been contacted by book publishers who were interested in using my photographs and when doing so, I want to know the context in which it will be used before giving permission.
I use Adobe Lightroom to process my photos and use the LR2/Mogrify plugin to watermark them in an obvious way. Lightroom has watermarking capabilities, but they’re extremely limited and watermarking a full resolution photo results in a watermark that’s too tiny to see in thumbnail mode that it looks like dust on the photo. I also add my information in the Copyright metadata field within the photo itself (although some photo editing applications unfortunately will wipe out that metadata).
In Flickr, I don’t allow downloading by the public and have made it difficult to right click and download the smaller photo (it’s a setting to overlay a blank image as a deterrent). Only my Flickr friends can download some photos (people photos usually); since Flickr doesn’t have more granular download permission settings available, I’ve gotten around it by only making the downloadable photos private and setting the license to which then allows downloading of the photos in private view.
In the old days, duplicating a photograph took a lot of time and effort; nowadays, photographers need to turn to technology deterrents to discourage plagarism.
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