My Thoughts On Watermarking + a Giveaway!

I am very particular with watermarking, I tread a very fine line of loving and hating it but that of course depends on the circumstances surrounding an image. Most of the time I believe that (in my case) I am taking a photo to express myself and it is part of my art, so it can be spoilt if you overlay a huge garish watermark over the top of a once beautiful image.. seriously, sometimes it makes me so angry! But at the same time I realise that if you're trying to make a living from photography, it is vital to watermark your images as a way of self promotion. Just imagine, a couple are scouring the internet for wedding photographers when all of a sudden they see your image and know they want to work with you!..but the image is posted somewhere without any details about the photographer.. well, with a watermark of your name or business stamped somewhere on the image the couple can search the web for your website and get in contact with you! Without that watermark, you would've lost a potential client and in today's economic climate, most businesses cannot afford to do that.

I have a real hatred for large ugly watermarks so in my opinion I think the best way to watermark your images is by making it very small and faint. That way it doesn't take over the image but it is still there to promote yourself. Here's an example:

However if while at your photography business a client asks to see their proof images, this style of watermarking may not be suitable. Instead you may decide you need something repeatedly imprinted on the image to prevent clients from saving the proof images and using them for free. In this case you may need something similar to this:

[image courtesy of Visual Watermark]

It all depends on the target audience and purpose of the image! 

The main issue that I used to have with watermarking was that there was no real easy way of watermarking your images. Every image you wanted to use would have to be opened up in photoshop and then you would create the watermark on the layer above the image.. try to do this more than 10 times and you will probably lose your marbles and give up! That is unless you have a tool to do it for you such as Visual Watermark.

Visual Watermark allows you to imprint the same watermark(s) on 100s of images in just 1 minute through batch processing. It is extremely easy and versatile to use, and just unbelievably fast! I was able to watermark all my recent blog photos in quite literally a second! It has a stunning interface to work with and my favourite feature is that the software taps into your computer's fonts so if you use a custom font on your website, you can use the same font as part of your watermark. Makes keeping a consistent brand identity so much easier!

And one of you guys will be able to win a copy of Visual Watermark by entering this giveaway! To enter the giveaway you just need to login in the widget below and fill out whatever entries you like, good luck everyone!

a Rafflecopter giveaway