How to watermark your images, and why

UPDATE:
Here is another article from the New York Times about people's photographs from Flickr being used without permission. I'm not saying that watermarking is a silver bullet, but I do think that it's a deterrent. Props to my friend Jamie for passing this article on to me.
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"Why should I watermark my images?", you ask?

Dan Heller, extremely knowledgeable on the topic, has this to say:

"The net-net is there's big money in copyright violations, especially if photos are registered with the copyright office and they are watermarked. What keeps this from becoming a more prominent figure in the industry itself is two-fold: the lack of awareness of how lucrative it can be, and the "resources" available for tracking the infringements in the first place. But, like anything that has the potential for money, there will be those who start down those paths to see where they lead. For those playing the home game, keep in mind that the issues faced by agencies are not shared by individual photographers. That is, while an agency may have business risk by being too aggressive in pursuing violators, individuals certainly do not. Even as I type this, yet another email has just trickled in from another concerned photographer, "I'm going to take my images off Flickr because I don't want them stolen." My response to him will be to read this article."

You really should read the entire post, it's long but very enlightening. I'm not saying that everyone should feel the need to watermark their images, but if you hope to one day make money from your work by selling it (to clients, stock photo agencies, etc.), then it's probably in your best interest to take some precautions to protect your hard work.

Here are some watermarking options. This is obviously not an exhaustive list -- it's just something to get you poking around.

Downloadable watermarking software

Mac

PicMark
http://www.digitalcalamity.org/lib/php/index.php?DC_item=picmark&DC_section=applications

Windows

Picture Shark
http://www.picture-shark.com/
It's free!

Photoshop watermarking tutorials

• http://www.ephotozine.com/article/Watermarking-your-photos-in-Photoshop-7-and-CS
• http://www.dpchallenge.com/tutorial.php?TUTORIAL_ID=64
• http://photoshop911.typepad.com/help/2004/04/watermarking_ph.html

Read the fine print

As you might expect, not all watermarking tutorials and software take the many factors into account. For instance, some of the tutorials only work on landscape photos of a certain size. Some are hard to use for batch processing of tens or hundreds of photos at once. It's best to find one that allows you to define some rules for how you want your watermark placed. Ideally the size/dimensions of the image shouldn't matter, and you should just be able to say "I want my watermark placed in the bottom right corner of the image, with a 20 pixel padding on the right and a 20 pixel padding on the bottom". Then you could batch process a whole directory of images with the peace of mind that your watermarking tool will just do the right thing, every time.


My Recommendation

I'm partial to this tutorial: you create an Adobe ImageReady droplet that you can just drag images onto for watermarking. A droplet is basically just an executable file that sits somewhere convenient (like your desktop, etc), and you can drag any files onto it that you want watermarked. Once you drag your photos onto the droplet, it processes your photos and creates a new copy of each one with a watermark added, and places them in a directory you have specified. I've found it very convenient to use. Of course, you need to have ImageReady installed to be able to use this, so it may not be the most convenient option for everyone.

The tutorial:
http://www.photosig.com/articles/1514/article

Here's an example that I've watermarked -- it's one of my favorite photos of my nephews.