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View Full Version : watermark manipulation and removal


J.T.
Feb-15-2008, 09:49 PM
In last months Popular Photography mag there was a small article that talked about how easy it is to steal an image off the web and remove the watermark.

As a pro user I have watermarked images, right click protection on and largest viewing size is large for all images.

If you can take a screen shot of an image in large view, save it as a jpeg, convert to a tiff, then re-save as a jpeg again, you can apparently remove the watermark. Mind you, the image quality may not be good, but in a technical aspect, is this really possible?

Or does the watermark feature that smugmug uses on our images displayed not able to be removed maliciously this way. I don't want to give any "dishonest web browsing picture stealer my space using thief :D" any ideas from this post, but I just wanted a bit of insight on this issue.

Thanks.

Allen
Feb-15-2008, 09:56 PM
In last months Popular Photography mag there was a small article that talked about how easy it is to steal an image off the web and remove the watermark.

As a pro user I have watermarked images, right click protection on and largest viewing size is large for all images.

If you can take a screen shot of an image in large view, save it as a jpeg, convert to a tiff, then re-save as a jpeg again, you can apparently remove the watermark. Mind you, the image quality may not be good, but in a technical aspect, is this really possible?

Or does the watermark feature that smugmug uses on our images displayed not able to be removed maliciously this way. I don't want to give any "dishonest web browsing picture stealer my space using thief :D" any ideas from this post, but I just wanted a bit of insight on this issue.

Thanks.
The watermark is part of the generated displayed photos not a layer and
your original is not touched. As long as you disabled originals you should
have no problem. Of course, if you have a WM that can be cropped off like
along an edge ...

Andy
Feb-16-2008, 06:04 AM
JT, why don't you try it?

http://www.moonriverphotography.com/photos/138586521_hS5Hk-X3.jpg