What is a Watermark?

Introduction

Watermark can be defined as a piece of a transparent text, image or logo, applied to a document or a photo to make it harder to copy or discourage plagiarism at all. From first sight, the term may seem a bit confusing, but this technique is known for a long time and is used mostly by photographers, graphic designers, and animators. It is used not only for securing original works but also for identifying them. Commonly it is associated with signing the works of art by the great painters, such as Rembrandt or Dali. Even though it wasn’t initially called as it is now, the main idea was to protect the works of art from plagiarism.

Moreover, watermarks are used for signing important documents, banknotes for identification purposes or to prevent copying.

Nowadays a watermarked image or document can contain the copyright sign ©, the famous word “Copyright”, the year the photo was taken or just a company name, website address - anything associated with the owner of the work. Unlike printing watermarks, intended to be visible, digital ones should be as invisible as possible. For that purpose, invisible watermarks are invented. This kind of watermark can hardly be detected by the human eye but can be simply done by computers or other devices.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Using Watermarks

We can list a lot of advantages to using a watermark. The most important advantage is that it provides the authors with a great opportunity to protect their intellectual property. Before adding a watermark to a picture, many companies change the pixels of the image. They prefer to apply watermarks on low-quality pictures so that the customers can only preview them. Whenever the customer decides to buy a picture, the company sends a high-quality image already without any watermark.

Special computer programs are widely used to place watermarks on photos. You can either use ready watermarks or create your own. With the help of a good watermark program, you can make your logo, using a variety of icons, fonts, and effects. You can choose both paid and free tools for watermarking. Keep in mind, that most of the free programs don’t provide any options for making their own watermarks. While using this kind of programs you need to choose from the ready ones.

A lot of research has been done for adding watermark logos that are hardly detectable to the human eye and are hard to remove. However, nowadays online watermark removers are as actual as ever.

As you can see, watermark serves as a modern, useful tool that helps you protect your pictures or documents from copying, but there is no guarantee that they won't be stolen after all. There are still several ways to crop watermarked images or to paint on.

Watermarks Can Make You Popular

Maybe you will get surprised, but watermarking also serves as a unique marketing tool. Thanks to it, your pictures can become more popular in the digital world. The viewers can easily remember the names of the authors and find them through social media or webpages.

Digital watermarks can be simply scanned by the users’ mobiles. For example, your mobile can scan a watermarked picture on the wall of your favorite cafeteria and it can link to the appropriate digital content. It is a new step in mobile marketing and surely will take it to a completely new level.

The idea of watermarking brought together thousands of professionals to find inspiration and create new ideas. For these purposes a group called Watermark Conference for Women was founded. The members of this group have created and continue creating successful projects in numerous aspects, such as education, media, society, health, government, law and even more.