Alternative to Photoshop For Watermarking Photosets?

http://www.photowatermark.com/

arles image creator

http://www.digitaldutch.com/arles/download.htm

Good program.

PHPThump to do it using your Unix based server online when uploading images or parsing directories after uploading from FTP.

thanks - looks good.

i have Arles - never had much luck with finding a nice balance between file size and pic quality using their jpeg compression.

i also use arles

http://www.faststone.org/

FastStone does the right thing!!

Image watermark (with transparency)
Text watermark (fonts and a few effects supported)
Batch processing

this one is perfect ........ and FREE!

thanks

why would you NOT want to use photoshop?

Photoshop is slow - just loading 100 uncompressed photos into PS's File Browser takes 5-10 minutes it seems. Then there is no way to watermark a set containing both landscape and portrait orientation pics with one batch action - need to do them seperately.

this Fastone software is 10 times as fast for doing this for me.

There is a way.
It's something I figured out a while back. Here's what you do. It SOUNDS more complex than it is, but once you set it up once, running watermarks is a breeze.


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*** FIRST STEP ***
You open your watermark (I assume you're using a graphic watermark) open the watermark. Then create a new transparent document that's like 3000 x 3000 pixels. Just make it at least as big as your largest dimension. Then paste in your watermark and position it in the lower right hand corner (again I assume that's where you want it) Then add a new layer, and on this layer put a single 1x1 pixel white dot in the upper left hand corner and in the lower lower right hand corner. Set the opacity of that layer to like 25%

Merge the layers together.

Now you should have a graphic watermark in the lower right corner and two micro dots (working as registration points) in the corners, all on a single layer.

rotate your canvas 180 degrees, so the watermark is upside down in the upper left corner now.

Save this document as a PSD, it will now be used for all your watermarking.

Select>all, then Edit>copy. Now you're set to paste the watermark into the images automatically. Next you have to build the actual action.



*** SECOND STEP ***
Open a photo and set it up to record an action. Start recording. First step, rotate canvas 180 degrees, and then hit CTRL+V (to paste). Now you should have an upside down image and an upside down watermark in the appropriate area. Hit CTRL+E to merge the layers together, rotate 180 degrees and then do a Save As. Save the image, close the image, and then stop recording the action.

Done.


*** USE ***
Then to batch, just open your watermark, select all and copy, then run the batch process. It's easy.
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Like I said it kind of sounds complex, but really all your doing is creating a watermark on a larger canvas, and then building an action that will paste it in the proper place.

As for the browser loading slow.. I dunno. PhotoShop browser is not as fast as Microsoft image viewer so I use that to sort my images then run the batch out of photoshop.

you can do it right on the server with imagemagick...

Thumbs Plus has always worked well for me

http://www.watermarkfactory.com
I have tried soo many and this is sweet.. Worth every penny

well thanks for the trick - i'll try it out just cuz i want to see how it works on a set with both landscape and portraits. how somebody came up with that trick is beyond me.

BUT now I've found this free Fastone software - it does everything/anything you'd want for watermarking and fast and it loads the thumbnails into a file browser of its own and that is 10 times faster than it takes for Photoshop's File Browser. Also the jpeg compression looks good - better than Photoshop's at the same KB size per pic.

i did 50 photosets with the Fastone in a few hours - now i forget when i started - might have been 4 or so hours but in Photoshop it was taking me 15minutes per set. I had to remove 1 GB of bad RAM so that doesn't help running Photoshop.

I can code you a custom watermarking web-based application.

let me know if you are interested.

I have an action I built that handles it just fine on both orientations.. hit me up ICQ, I would be happy to share.

Works on all CS versions.. never used PS7 or prior, so don't know about those.

I use EyeBatch

Mutt you can use gallery2's dynamic watermark feature. Since it's dynamic it doesn't destroy the image and you can use the zip function to zip up the "watermarked" pics and download them enmasse.

It saves a ton of time and because it's dynamic you can change the watermark at anytime in less than a minute across thousands of images.

that sounds pretty cool - what's the URL to gallery2?

i'll hit you up for it - i could never figure out how to do it without making seperate actions for different orientated pics.

http://gallery.menalto.com/

yeap..I recommend it too..

nice one

some great ideas in here

what about adobe lightroom

Yep its a cool program

try going to download.com and searching for that. there's a lot of good freeware/sharewear there.