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Invisible Watermarks
Published: 2004-06-12 01:05:53 +0000 UTC; Views: 99551; Favourites: 1041; Downloads: 57329
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Description
One of the ways to help preventing image theft is to add a watermark to your digital works.This is something you could do to help preventing the increasing image theft in the Internet.
Brief:
In this article you can see how you can add an invisible watermark to your photos, traceable only in IE browsers.
This article explains basic Adobe® Photoshop® tools and techniques to create invisible watermarks to your images, along with an example of a finished, watermarked picture.
The author of this article is ~ocsurfer .
How to see the article:
Please click on the download button (downwards arrow) and the article will display in the browser. You can then click 'back' on your browser to return to deviantART.
Watermark your work #1
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Comments: 457
Strange, I've tried this 17 times now, and I still get the same thing. I can see the watermark in IE when viewing the image, but when I hit "Ctrl-A" it vanishes. (and I'm using CS too) Weird
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funny, i swear someone sumbmitted this exact same deviation a while ago... maybe i'm wrong...
very cool info tho
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This is so fantastic, exactly what DeviantArt needs! 
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wwow i feel special! i figured this out by myself! (not being sarcastic/or any other bad...thing..i'm just happy)
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This worked great for me but not at first.
Heh it was my fault using an image with a transparent background.
I just went to the image layer and with magic wand selected the background, switched to the layer with the grid and hit delete thus deleting the area around the image so that it wouldn't show and moved the text to hide completely behind the image. So when I highlight it on IE the effect shows in the shape of the image.
Thanks for this very helpful tutorial!
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Look I have done exacly like the manual says (invisible watermarks)and with no results.What Did I do wrong??
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I don't know if anyone's already mentioned this... reading through the best part of 300 comments at 1am seemed a bit of a bad idea.
Simply resizing the image by any amount, even a measly one pixel, will render this watermarking completely invisible, as opposed to invisible except when highlighted in IE. The reason for this is that the dither pattern (i.e. that little 2x2 thing you set up at the start) will be thrown off by the resizing, the individual pixels being smushed together and blurred somewhat in a loose approximation of their previous state. IE itself uses the same 2x2 dither pattern to highlight selected items, so if the patterns don't match up exactly with one another then the watermarking won't show up. It's still there, of course, just not in any easily extractable or displayable fashion.
So yeah, it's a nice idea... but if someone resizes the art they steal, then this method will fail. You can also get around it by blurring the picture by a tiny amount, and so on -- all of these things will compromise the quality of the thief's copy of the art, but it's likely to be pretty negligible. So saying, if the person stealing the art doesn't notice the watermarking (and it's pretty hard to spot), and so long as they don't resize/blur/whatever anyway, then it'll work, and is probably a good thing to use in conjunction with other methods
Of course, I'm not really one to be criticising... people seem to steal my art quite regularly, and I haven't found a watermarking method I really like yet 
Thanks. Keep up the good work
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WOW!!!!!!!!!!!!! YOU ARE A GENIOUS!!!!!!!!!!!! Thank you very much for this!!!!! *__*
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WOW, I've always wanted to know how to do this. Thanks for explaning it!
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Nice. I tried it out and it works.
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Not exactly perfect but still handy
Wish there was a way to make it work in Firefox, though.
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HOw do I do this in Gimp? I'm fine up to 'rasterizing' it
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Rasterizing in Photoshop simply turns editable vector text into pixels that can't be edited by the type tool. I'm sure you can do that in Gimp somehow.
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The "Layer to Imagesize" does that I think...
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I would like to use it........ but since I have photoshop 2.0 the Adjustment part dosn't work. .. Umm is there a different way to do that?
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Are you using Photoshop or Photoshop elements? Because PS is up to version 8, and PSE is up to i think 2. Either that's the case or you're using an extremely ancient build of Photoshop.
Anyway the adjustments-->invert command simply reverses the colors in the picture (i.e. black to white, yellow to purple, etc).
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woo!! 
To complete this, I make a pattern with only the message layer(invert), and the layer with the pattern(in exclution mode), this is to repeat the message in all the image.
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I tryed it but it doesnt showup for me o_O What did i do wrong lol
Can i get an SS of how the end of the layer come out plz XD lol
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BTW ALSO I DID PUT OCCUPACITY ON MY TOP LAYER....
and EXCLUSION to my second layer which is a diagonal 2px by 2px BLACK LINE....
and inverted my last layer so from BLACK to WHITE....
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i'm really ANGRY and sooooo MUCH DEPRESSED...
i tried to read ur tutorial..
and i did practice it...
OVER 30 times OVER AND OVER.... almost 2hrs in PHOTOSHOP...
and all i can see is A LARGE WHITE DIAGONAL LINE when i HIGHLIGHT IT...
i put text though UNDERNEATH IT BUT IT REALLL DON't SHOW.......
i did a 2px by 2px DIAGONAL LINE....
then THE TOP LAYER IS MY PROTECTED PICTURE
then the second layer is my DIAGONAL FIL... of the text......... w/c is BLACK
thn the last layer is a black text taht u said needed to be inveted to WHITE... so i did...
BUT WHEN I SAVE IT AS JPEG highest QUALITY...
and look it 30 times over and over IN IE...
all i can see is when highlighted IS A DARN... DIAGONAL LINE...
I'm soooooooooooooooooo SAD......
HELP PLEASE............. TT___TT
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Anyone who ever feels like putting any art onto the internet needs this.
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It leaves nasty residue, no matter what I do, right in the middle of the image. =\ I followed it step by step and everything.
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That is so helpful. I'm going to fav it and spread the word. Thank you for posting this.
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If noone else has mentioned this yet -- this feature DOES work in Mozilla Firefox, I believe! ^_^
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I tried out this tutorial tonight. THe watermark turned out lovely, but I don't like how it takes away from the colour intensity or picture quality :\ Am I doing something wrong, or do you just have to compromise the quality of the image for the sake of the invisible watermark?
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I love it. My problem is figurin out how to do all that in Gimp, since my Photoshop isn't working atm... aaaarrrgghhh so hard!!! Need photoshop back!
*sigh*
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How do you propose to counteract the dulling of the image when it is mostly black?
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Cool, mabey if I become real good like Maui and other people i'll use em.
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Wonderful, I've been wondering how to do these for a while 
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What format should I export the "protected" image? as in for web browseing, I tried to save it was a JEPG to reduce the file size, and the watermark didn't work.
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this is great .. but i tested it and it seems to only work for IE not for firefox .. it would be quite useless then .. what a shame :/
but it really is great for ie
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Thats pretty cool. But if u look at the image in a different browser such as mozilla firefox, the watermark doesn't show up, otherwise this is a really cool technique
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this................is......the coolest thing that photoshop can ever do!!! ;_; thank you so much for sharing this. 
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WOAH! i can finally protect my works from art thieves!
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Very cool, pity it makes the image lighter than it is, and in non-full view you see huge a chequred background and lower quality.
Hmm, I will consider either using this or the visible watermark.
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just done my first - very cleaver
MY FIRST HIDDEN WATERMARK
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