Watermark Factory

www.watermarkfactory.com

_{Reviewed by} Maureen Shannon, NJPCUG

Watermark Factory is a must have for the digital photographer or hobbyist. Including any business or home user with a need to protect their imagery. Nothing is more maddening than to post an image online or send one to a client for feedback and find that they have figured out a way to bypass your security and snagged the photo for free. You don’t get paid for your efforts or you lose the image you put all that time and effort into preparing. You have lost your investment in that image both time-wise and monetarily. It’s not fair is it? I have had it done to me, I know how it feels. I’ve even had people complain to me that I made it difficult for them to get the photo!

Having used watermarking products in the past and finding them either not up to par or that they require a service that involves too much of a hassle to set up, I finally ended up creating my own watermark logo and adding it to photos. I did this for a long time and then forgot about keeping it up. It worked fairly well except that anyone who could clone or do a bit of editing could remove it if it wasn’t placed in a spot that would not be damaged by the removal process. Digital watermarks work differently but require a service to do this and don’t provide the watermark protection you want to have on proofs or shared images. What you seek here is preventing someone from taking the images for free after you have spent time working on them.

Fortunately when there is a need, someone comes up with a solution. Whether that solution fills or exceeds the need will influence what we buy. Watermark Factory exceeds those expectations and offers a multi-featured product that anyone should be delighted to have in the graphic toolbox.  I have another product from this same company, MediaResizer Pro, and it is one of my favorites for very similar reasons. It has many features and is so easy to use.

Watermark Factory enables the user to add a variety of text or image watermarks and do some editing to the image in the process. It has a simple and easy to use interface through which all the editing and previewing is done. Not only can you prepare and design a variety of watermarks for your images, you can batch process an entire set or folder and then save the newly watermarked images with a new name, prefixes and/or suffixes, preserving the originals just as they were before the addition of a watermark. It’s quick, easy, and yields perfect results time after time. No struggles, no problems, just select you choice of watermark, include any information you wish to add such as dates, times, copyright, and the like and presto, it’s added to the image.

This example shows several text watermarks protecting the image.

If you want to further mark the image to protect a proof copy, you can tile watermarks across the entire image in plain text, embossed text, or just about any combination that suits you needs. You can add several styles to the same image and to the entire batch processed selections. Never risk giving out your work for approval or as an example of the quality of your work without ensuring it is safe from being take without your permission. Protection and peace mind by watermarking your photos using Watermark Factory is something everyone should do for themselves.

Added features included in Watermark Factory are cropping, effects, and options to resize, rename, sharpen, and replace and alpha channel by color.  The image to the left is the cropping dialog box. Using drag handles, you can move and resize the crop area, click ok to save or cancel to leave it in its original format. The Effects include Styles and Masks as shown in the two images below. It comes with a variety of mask shapes and the styles include effects like a, soft border, bevel, shadow, or a combination of the last two styles.

Craftily hidden in the left lower corner of this photo layout I did of William, is my name with the date using an embossed, transparent watermark. The watermark attributes can all be changed to any number of interesting designs or for specific functionality. You can use plain text, or change the style, size, and opacity. The position can be set with the position defaults, manually set, and also rotated and angled. Watermarks from a set of premade images is also included in this application. There’s something for everyone in Watermark Factory and I recommend it highly as a must have if your sharing images on-line or professionally providing proofs to your clientele.

Watermark Factory sells for $40 home user, $79.95 Business license. At this time of this writing, the personal license edition is on sale for $29.95!  

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