Category Archives for Photography

Copyright Watermark in Lightroom

This is for anyone wanting to place a copyright watermark on their photos in Adobe Lightroom.  I had so much trouble working this out that I decided to post a mini tutorial on how to do this.   I searched for ages online and everyone had only part answers or poor answers.  I am using a Mac so this may not help Windows users.  I’m using Lightroom 1.4 but I’m sure it works for verson 2 as well.  So here goes…

Step 1: Go to the Library section of Lightroom and locate the Metadata on the bottom of the right panel.  Type in your copyright details (eg. ©2009 John Smith).  You can insert a copyright symbol by pressing “alt – g”.

copyright1

Step 2: Export your photo.  In your Export window tick the checkbox to add a copyright watermark to your photo.  Then, export.

copyright2

I sincerely hope this helps as it was quite a painful experience for me.  To everyone who thought this was easy, well, you could have posted better instructions!  Below is one of my photos with a watermark created this way.

rain-001

Update:  A really obvious way to insert a copyright symbol “©” for any type of operating system is to find one online/on a document and copy and paste it.  I can’t believe I never thought of that before!

Update 2:  A few people have remarked that they could not see the watermark or that it was too small.  This is because you need to resize the image to a smaller web display size.  The reason for this is that most people watermark for web publishing and not for full size prints.  I normally resize my images to around 825×550 pixels for web display.

Saved

 

man in praise

For some stupid reason, last night, I accidentally formatted my memory card from my digital camera.  This is upsetting in most situations but this also happened to contain a wedding job I just photographed.  I FREAKED out.  I begged and prayed, I ran in little circles in my room and chanted in expletives.  Then I went into damage control mode and scoured the internet for data recovery software.  I stumbled upon Stellar Phoenix, a Mac data recovery software.  I didn’t care how much it cost (not too much) so I entered in my credit card details and downloaded it.  Watching the progress bar with super human intent, I observed the software slowly extract what hopefully was useful data.  I was impressed that it had a function that only looked for media files and categorised them.  My photos were saved!

I know that there could be many reading this now thinking, “ha, I know where to find a free version”, or “he could have just done…” but in the dark of night where disaster strikes, one just has to find a solution and I feel I survived my first memory card disaster reasonably well.   I didn’t sleep much that night but I slept, amazed that in a space of three hours I despaired, battled, fought and conquered without anyone in the world knowing of this epic war with my memory card.  Well, unless you read this.

Could this be an allegory for a more spiritual message that you might have expected to read?  You decide.