watermarking

Update: According to software developer WonderFox Soft, iWonderSky Software is not allowed to give away WonderFox DVD Ripper licenses. Therefore, at the former's request, we have removed the link for the promotion.

Why settle for one freebie when you can get three?

From now until October 19, iWonderSky Software (which I believe was formally known as WonderFox Software) is offering CNET readers this exclusive: three Windows video utilities absolutely free.

First up: WonderFox DVD Ripper. Normally $39.95, it can convert just about any DVD into just about any digital format. It comes with profiles for a wide variety … Read more

You're proud of your digital snapshots and want to share them without spreading them across the Internet. The solution is to watermark your pictures, just like Corbis, Life, and other big online archives do. Easy Watermark Studio Lite creates and places watermarks on single images or whole batches of pictures. It adds text and image watermarks, and it includes a variety of preconfigured watermarks that let you establish copyright, prohibit copying or unauthorized use, and other digital rights. It supports JPEG, BMP, and TIFF images. Easy Watermark Studio Lite is freeware, but it's also available in a Pro … Read more

Watermarking helps secure your images and documents from unauthorized use and theft. TSR Watermarking Image Software Portable is a totally portable version of TSR's basic watermarking package. It's free for individuals, but commercial users must buy a license when their 30-day trial expires. Since it's totally portable, it can run from a USB drive, compact flash drive, and similar media. That makes it a great choice for on-the-go photographers since it can watermark images from any compatible PC.

TSR Watermarking's user interface is businesslike, with few frills, if any. Three tabs handle the program's functions: … Read more

Imagine sweeping your phone around a room and seeing a plethora of information about the pictures, music, and video around you. The Digimarc Discover app lets your phone read QR codes printed on products, identify tunes playing nearby, buy tickets when movies are advertised on a TV playing near you, and follow watermark links hidden in articles and product packaging.

Digital watermark purveyor Digimarc demoed the technology this spring and has now made the free app for iOS and Android available for download. The app falls somewhere between simple bar code readers and augmented-reality apps that recognize real-world objects and link information to them.

Digimarc Discover is the Swiss Army knife of real-world identification. It figures out the most appropriate identifying technologies for a given situation--QR code, watermark, audio and/or video--depending on where you are and how you've used it in the past.… Read more

There are a ton of watermark programs out there, and with so many to choose from, it doesn't make sense to settle for a mediocre one. Thus, we can't say that we recommend Sofonesia Image Watermark particularly highly. It does work, but its lack of features and user-friendliness didn't do much to impress us.

The program's interface looks promising, with the watermark process outlined by three steps at the top. You first select the image that you want to watermark. This is an annoying task, as when the file dialog opens there's no option to … Read more

It seems that many people on the Internet have no qualms about "borrowing" other people's work and either failing to attribute it properly or outright claiming it as their own. Photographers and other artists who wish to share their work online are well advised to use watermarks to ensure that their name is never separated from their creations. Scaling Watermark is a simple program that can brand your images with watermarks that can be read at both full size and thumbnail size. It's not as fancy as some other watermark programs we've seen, but we … Read more

One of the dangers of sharing your creative work online is that other people can easily steal it and claim it as their own. Watermarks are one easy way to make sure that your name is never disassociated from your digital images. WaterMark V2 is a versatile program that lets users add custom watermarks to their images without a lot of hassle.

The program's interface isn't the most intuitive thing we've ever seen, but we were able to figure it out fairly easily with a bit of poking around. The first step involves creating the watermark itself, … Read more

When astrophysicist Geoff Rhoads wanted to protect his photographs of planets from online theft in the mid-1990s, he developed watermarking technology that would help him keep track of the images he posted to the Internet. The antipiracy technology formed the basis for his company Digimarc.

Sixteen years and approximately 600 patents later (and another 400 patents pending), Digimarc hasn't exactly helped movie studios and record labels put digital pirates out of business yet, but it's on the verge of providing some interesting applications to smartphone users. And it could help print media companies tap into some much-needed but … Read more

TSR Watermark Image Software from andromedaIT is a free program that can add watermarks to your images and documents. You can use it to mark the images you post online to keep them from being reused without your permission. You can make your watermarks barely visible or unmistakable, depending on your needs: a light mark for credit on images you mean to share, and heavy marking to protect images from being reused, such as when photographers post example images on their Web sites.

TSR Watermark's interface resembles a properties dialog but is really a typical three-panel Windows app in … Read more