Posted January 1, 2016
Maintaining watermark integrity
BY Geoffrey Karr
We've had increasing interest by our customers on how to best maintain the integrity of digital watermarks. Here are a few tips and tricks that should help in the long run:
High strength watermarks survive the best.
Make sure to embed your images with a higher strength; this just means you are putting more watermark signal into your image. With our new "Chroma" technology, we suggest using an embed strength of 3 or 4, as the watermark should still be imperceptible. It is also easier for your watermark to survive when you save your final image at a maximum quality setting in Photoshop.
There's an optimal time to apply your watermark. Try your best to watermark the image in its final derivative. This means that if you are presenting an image that is 960x640, make sure to re-size it to as close to its final size as possible before embedding the watermark.
Watermarks love low compression.
Lastly, if you can, try to use low compression settings. Compression removes pixels, and that's where the watermark lives.
Here's a quick tip for our Facebook customers:
Facebook now supports two methods when uploading your images, "High-Res" (2048 pixels on the largest edge) and "Standard" (960 pixels on the largest edge). When friends are viewing your images, they are always displayed at the "Standard" resolution. When you upload an image that is larger, it will get sampled down based on which method you choose. This process can eliminate the digital watermark depending on how much your image is scaled down. The optimum way for the digital watermark to survive is to sample your images down to around 1000x1000 pixels prior to watermarking. This will match the "Standard" size Facebook uses for displaying images and means that very little scaling will occur on your image no matter which method you choose for uploading.