iffles.com

A lot of people want to protect their images on the internet by adding a watermark – typically this is a logo or words with the photographers name, website or logo that’s somewhat transparent so you can see the image below it.

I think we know enough about layers at this point that you could all figure out how to do this yourself, but wouldn’t it be easier to have a script do it for us?

Why, yes. Yes it would. And I’m sure you’re shocked to hear that I found a script for that. It’s called Watermark it.

There are instructions on the website on how to install it, because it’s different than the ones we’ve done in the past – the short of it is that you have to copy and paste the text of the script from the webpage into Notepad (or the text editor of your choosing – don’t use Word, though) and save it as an .scm file in the same scripts folder we’ve been using all along.

Note: If you use Windows, make sure when you save it, you save it from Notepad using quotes around the file name (Like “watermark-it.scm”), otherwise Notepad will add the default .txt extension and your script won’t work.

Once you have the script installed, you’ll find it under Filters –> Decor –> Watermark it, and here are all your options:

You’ll notice you can select a location for an image watermark or you can write in some text for a text watermark. The dropdowns at the bottom that are set to “No Watermark” but default have options for Image Watermark and Text Watermark. So, I could put an image watermark in the bottom-right color, and a text watermark in the center if I so desired.

Text Watermark

To check it out the first time, I wanted to have it put “iffles.com” in the bottom-left, so I used the following options (I circled the things I changed):

And this is the result I got:

I don’t know about you, but I don’t like it. For one thing, I don’t like that blue box around my text (and I was surprised it let me pick my font color, but not the color of that blue box), and I think maybe I’d like it to have a little less opacity. So I go to check out the Layers and see what I can play with – and… NOTHING! It seems the script flattened the image. I HATE scrips that do that without asking me.

Now, I don’t know much about the scripting language, but I decided I’d open up the .scm file in Notepad and take a look anyway, and I saw this line:

It sure looked to me like that was flattening my image – so I deleted that line (just the highlighted line)! I then saved it and refreshed my scripts (by going to Filters –> Script-Fu –> Refresh Scripts), and now when I run it, I have layers:

Now I can change that blue color to something else by using the bucket fill tool on that layer, or, as I prefer it, I could just make that entire layer invisible, so now it looks like this:

(oh, I also changed the opacity if the iffles.com layer to 45)

What about using images?

So, I created this image based off of the logo of my website:

Now, someone else made that logo for me originally, so I don’t have the original file, and so my copy of it looks kinda crappy, but it’s good enough to test out the script, right? Right. Good.

So now I run Watermark It again, with these options:

And I got these results:

Oooookay. It put the watermark where I wanted it, but that doesn’t look very good. I also noticed that even though I took out that “flatten”, it’s still flattening the image. So I took a look at the .scm file again. For the life of me, I could NOT figure out why it was still flattening the image – most of this stuff is greek to me (so, if anyone knows, please let us know in the comments!), but I DID see this line (near the top of the script), which was setting the layer mode to Value:

Playing around with my watermark image myself, I figured out that I like it with a Hard Light mode, so I switched that line to read instead:

(gimp-layer-set-mode floatinglayer HARDLIGHT-MODE)

You’ll want to play with this yourself – you might like the value mode for your watermark image. Whatever mode you like, just change the VALUE to the name of that mode (with no spaces). Then save the .scm file and refresh the scripts in Gimp. After changing the script, my image watermark now looks like this:

Much better :)

Watermark Batch

So, you probably noticed that there’s a watermark-batch.scm, too. And I added it, and it showed up in my Filter menu, but when I ran it, it didn’t work. According to the website, it has been reported to not work for some people in Windows. It definitely didn’t work for me. I have Vista. It doesn’t take long to add it, though, so you can always try adding it yourself and giving it a shot.

When you run the script, the options look jus like Watermark it did, with two additional fields for the path to the folder where the pictures curretnly are, and a path to where you want it to save the watermarked images.

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