Two Easy Ways to Watermark Your Photos

Step-by-step: How to Create a Watermark

Easy and Free

Irfanview is a wonderful piece of freeware that's fast, small, and can be used by anyone from beginner to professional. This program makes it easy to watermark your photos. As a bonus, Irfanview, which works with Windows products from Win 9x to Vista, has a lot of other features you'll want to explore.

Once you've downloaded Irfanview, choose File -- Open and select which photograph on your hard drive you want to watermark. Place your mouse pointer in the place you want your watermark to appear on the photograph, and holding down the left mouse button, draw a rectangle.

You can resize the box if you didn't get it exactly right the first time by left-clicking, and you can move it by right-clicking.

Under Edit, choose Insert text into selection. You can insert any text you want, and Irfanview automatically gives you the option to enter the copyright symbol, the date, and the time. You can also choose fonts and font sizes, and change background colors.

I recommend using the Save As option and renaming the photo so you know which ones you've watermarked.

Easy, but expensive

If you own Adobe's Photoshop program, you probably already use it to edit your photos. There are at least two ways to watermark your photos using Photoshop. Down and dirty, and digitally.

Down and dirty. Open the photograph you want to apply your watermark to. Choose the Text tool, place your mouse pointer where you want your text to appear, and type it. Choose Edit -- Transform if you want to change the size of your text box. Again I recommend using the Save As command, and putting all of your watermarked photos in one folder.

To digitally watermark your photos with Photoshop, you need to register with Digimarc, which is not free. One of the beauties of Digimarc is that you can track where your pictures are being used online. If you choose to register, the steps are simple.

Open the photo you want to watermark. Select Filter -- Digimarc -- Embed Watermark. You then have the option to enter what information you want contained in your watermark like the date, whether or not the use is restricted, and if there's adult content. Couldn't be simpler.

Feel any safer? A friend used this analogy when we were discussing photo piracy. She said that anybody can steal any car, but they're less likely to steal the car that has layers of protection. A watermark might be one of your most effective layers.