Yakshagana by Diji (www.dijisworld.com)

As you have seen in this article on copyright infringement, I decided to implement watermarking of all my images which are larger than 500 pixels. I felt the watermarking is justified to solve similar copyright infringement in future. Friend of mine Dijiraj has experienced a bizarre twist on this scenario. A few days ago he was visiting the Chitra Santhe at Bangalore and came across a stand of paintings, being sold as original work of art. The only problem was that the painter had made “faithful” (but unattributed) reproduction in paint of Diji’s photographic image which is shown above. If you have a facebook account you can check the photo of the painting taken at Chitrasanthe by Smrithi Kangovi here. Now image resolution or a watermark wouldn’t make much difference here, a painter could nick a photo at screen resolution. The painter had “stolen” friend’s intellectual property and made it his own by interpreting it in paint. The law apparently sees no problem with this.

The rights of copyright holders need to be protected, but some draconian remedies that have been suggested would create more problems than they would solve.
- Patrick Leahy

By definition a written quote is attributed and hence a context. If it’s not attributed then it’s just theft. Whereas a copied photograph from the net rarely, if ever, attributed properly. We obviously haven’t the time, or the capability, to study all the works of art in the world to check whether this is in fact true so a percentage of people will get away with making rip-offs without being caught.

Philosophically, originality is linked to free will. If we are all beavering away in our own corners, minding our own business, creating for ourselves, then anything we haven’t done personally before, is original. And then there is no reason not to do something that someone else has already done. If however, we are all in it together, then originality is defined with respect to the community. And then, it is up to the individual to be fully aware of what everyone else has ever done.

I fully accept that the theft of images from the net does take place. However there is always the risk that whenever you put your images out there that they might be stolen. Does this mean that we should never show our images on the net or in print? No, of course it doesn’t! What’s the point in making images if we don’t share them? Life is full of risks and this is just one of them. One just needs to take the precautions one sees fit – as long as they fall short of paranoia!

For me, My photograph’s purpose should be (amongst other things!) to uplift, inspire, evoke and enlighten – not simply to make money. Though I do need to pay that bill… So I prefer to have my images without watermarks. So what do you think? Should I keep them or remove them? I want your opinion in this regards before I take a decision regarding watermark.

Watermark

I was shocked to see that one of my photograph was displayed as a hoarding at the entrance of an exhibition, without my permission. As this was copyrighted image and the person(s) who were exhibiting this did not take any permission whatsoever from me and have displayed it without even informing me. The photo was obviously taken from my web page as I had not distributed the original elsewhere. They had cleverly cropped out my copyright info at the bottom left corner. Blown it up using software and then printed on a 15×20 feet sized large format print.

I was able to find out the copyright violators and asked them to comply to my term of copyright or face legal actions. They realized their mistake and readily agreed to my terms. So the whole matter was settled amicably. But the question that remains at large is that my pictures are source of attraction for others to steal. What should I do to safeguard them? I was thinking of several solutions which are possible.

Let us examine different methods to prevent such copyright infringement of photographs which are published on the website like this one.

• Reduce size of images I can show only preview of my images which are 500 pixel in size which can be easily copied but since it is so small it will be useless for anything but a preview.
• Reduce quality of images This will result in ugly preview of my images. Reducing quality of images is not a good idea. Why put ugly photos on photography site which will show me in a bad light.
• Use javascript to disable right click and save Not fool proof. It will not stop web page saving and making screen shots. Does not work on the Mac OS. But it is a smart way of telling people the images are copyrighted.
• Adding a transparent gif over the top of your image in a web page. This is what Flickr does. You can show original images. Gives the wrong image when saving by right mouse click. But does not stop screen capture programs and saving web page.
• Adding visible watermarks to images Big non transparent watermarks do not allow restore original images. But small watermark can be easily cropped out . Transparent watermark can be repainted or cloned out (but the work is very difficult). Often people do not care who owns the image. This is the most popular way to protect images. Use several big transparent watermarks for improving protection quality. The image will look uglier than the pristine original.
• Digital watermarking adding invisible watermarks Hidden, so thief will not know it is there. You can prove your copyright. But since it is hidden, how do people know it is copyrighted? Finding stolen pictures is dependent on the thief actually posting the image online AND getting that page indexed at the search engines. Newer services like TinEye help to find such stolen pictures without having to resort to digital watermarking
• Making images into Flash or Shockwave objects No right click, no drag and drop, no web-page saving. But it does not protect against screen capture. Flash is not universally accepted format and is a time consuming way.
• Making pictures Java Applets
  You can show original image or part of your image as you want. No right click, no drag and drop, no print, no web-page saving. But does not stop screen capture programs. Mobile devices may not show image. Java is not as good as it could be. It also slows the web page rendering somewhat.
• Last but the best one is not to show your images at all Nothing lost or gained

I usually downsize my image to maximum of 1200 pixel at 100 dpi. I found that even using simple image viewing software like irfanview or FastStoneViewer this JPEG file can be blown up easily to 5 times its original size without drastic change in quality. Modern algorithms of resizing make this easy. If you use dedicated softwares which can enlarge photos like onOne Genuine fractals 6 or Alien Skin Blowup 2 you can get very large format picture with fantastic quality.

Till now I was publishing such photos without watermark. I felt that my pictures need to be enjoyed without the blemish of ugly watermark in the background. From now on I’ll be putting watermark at the center of the picture so as to prevent people from stealing my work without crediting me. I know this will look ugly, but leaves me with no choice. If you notice all my photos in the blog have gained watermark by now. I will be using watermark only in the larger version and smaller version will still be watermark free.

I have a Asus eeepc. I dare not load my Photoshop there on that 7 inch screen. But I have my trusty Irfanview to browse photos. Recently I came to know of another free image viewer / editor called FastStone. At the first glance the name looks like fastone but remember it is fast stone. Let us see how it fares against Irfanview.

Like Irfanview, FastStone provides lightning fast image viewing. Like Infranview, FastStone supports a boatload of file formats and coverts between them. The main difference is that Infranview is about the single image where Faststone is about the browser. The Thumbnail viewer in Irfanview is pathetic if compared to FastStone.

FastStone Browser interface

FastStone Features

There are two views in FastStone – the browser, and the image view. The browser has the familiar Windows tree for navigation. It has thumbnails (though you can choose list or details view) in the main pane, and a preview of the selected picture for getting a bigger view without selecting a picture. FastStone doesn’t just show images, it can also give you video previews. It stores the preview thumbnails in a database, so once you it loads them the first time, the thumbnails fly up on the screen the next time you view the directory. Oh, and if you like working with RAW files, no problem. FastStone supports every camera model that anyone who actually uses RAW files would own.

Here are few features of FastStone.

• Image browser and viewer with a familiar Windows Explorer-like user interface
• Support of many popular image formats:
• True Full Screen viewer with image zoom support and unique fly-out menu panels
• Crystal-clear and customizable one-click image magnifier
• Superior Red-Eye effect removal/reduction with completely natural looking end result
• Image modification tools: Resize/resample, rotate/flip, crop, sharpen/blur, brightness/contrast, etc.
• Eleven (yes, 11) resampling algorithms to choose from when resizing images
• Image color effects: gray scale, sepia, negative, Red/Green/Blue adjustment
• Image special effects: watermark, annotation, drop shadow, framing, bump map, lens, morph, waves
• Multi-level Undo/Redo capability
• One-touch best fit/actual size image display support
• Image management, including tagging capability, with drag-and-drop and Copy To/Move To Folder support
• Histogram display with color counter feature
• Compare images side-by-side (up to 4 at a time) to easily cull those forgettable shots
• Image EXIF metadata support (plus comment editing for JPEGs)
• Configurable batch processing to convert/rename large or small collections of images
• Slideshow creation with 150+ transition effects and music support (MP3, WMA, WAV…)
• Create efficient image attachment(s) for emailing to family and friends
• Print images with full page-layout control
• Create fully configurable Contact Sheets – just like the pros (and save $$$ on ink)
• Create memorable artistic image montages from your family photos for personalized desktop wallpapers (Wallpaper Anywhere)
• Acquire images from a scanner
• Versatile screen capture capability
• Powerful Save As interface to compare image quality and control generated file size
• Run favorite programs with one keystroke from within Image Viewer
• Configurable mouse wheel support
• Supports multiple program skins
• Supports dual-monitor configurations
• And much more…

Even with all that FastStone can do, if you ever feel like you’ve gotten in over your head, there is an Edit Menu choice for Edit with External program where you can pick Photoshop or Lightroom or whatever you like for your heavy lifting.

File support comes easy. Virtually any image file type you’ve heard of can be opened in FastStone. If you want to convert to another file, either use the conversion tools, or just choose Save As and pick your file type. There is a great screenshot utility builtin into FastStone. The file comes out as PNG but most websites will only allow you to upload JPG or GIF. Just open the file, Click Save As, pick JPG for the file type. If you want to make it quicker loading, click advanced and choose your quality level all without leaving the save dialog box.

FastStone Batch Features
Because Faststone is all about the browser, it comes with tons of operations that can be performed on multiple images. Whether you want to rename a bunch of files, or convert a bunch of files to JPG, Faststone can handle it. It can also build contact sheets and wallpapers all from the menus. Oh yeah, and it makes slideshows. Everyone does that? Does everyone make a file that can be played anywhere without any software installed? Faststone does and it can add music, and over 100 different transistions so you can shake up that family reunion slideshow a little bit. You’ll show up with an exe file if you want. Just run it!

Compare multiple photos together in FastStone

Quick and Easy
See that map? That’s a Copy Selection to Clipboard from a PDF file, pasted into Faststone, saved as a JPG, added the arrows and the text, resized, and saved as a JPG suitable for emailing. Total time? Four minutes flat, and most of that was me dinking around with color choices (do the yellow boxes stand out better than the orange boxes?).
Conclusion

FastStone Image Viewer 3.6 is so good that it is better than many commercial products out there. FastStone Image Viewer is free for personal and educational (including non-profit organization) use. In these cases, you are granted the right to use and to make an unlimited number of copies of this software.

Only part I didnot like in FastStone was the skinning. It uses its own skin and does not adapt to the windows skins you use currently. There is no way to turn off skin customization to have a “standard” viewing of the window interface. So if you have skinned your windows then FastStone window stands out as sore thumb. Other than that I don’t have any cribs about it. in Fact now it has replaced my default image viewer Irfanview.