14 DAY TRIAL // Put your own seal over the pictures you take to individualize and mark them as your creations. Fast Watermark is the simple software solution designed to help you keep intact the originality of your photos.
Just like the great artists put their signature on their products, you can also embed your personal touch into digital images to personalize them and also make sure no one claims any rights of ownership over your work, especially if you're into graphic design. The easiest way to do so is by enlisting the help of a specialist, like Fast Watermark, that can get the job done as quickly and neatly as possible.
This lightweight piece of software doesn't require installation, it is ready to go right out of the box, or, to be more precise, right out of the ZIP archive it comes packed in. The little freebie stands true to its name offering you the possibility to create and use watermarks on the fly. And there's even more good news if you wanted a utility with which to stamp dozens of pictures at once because this application also works with batches of files or entire folders at once.
What you won't find too appealing about it is the interface, to start with. The GUI lacks any eye-candying elements and, in fact, looks like something Leonidas would go for if he could take some time off his Spartan kingly businesses. Appearance aside though, the practicality and the efficient layout of the functions should also be noted because this is the real goal of this tool, to serve a clear cut purpose rather than offering visual delight.
After a quick glance at the commands panel you'll easily understand how things work: write the text that you want to display onto the images, paint it the right way and give it a good spot to sit in. It takes only a few minutes to decide which font face to use, its size, border thickness and coloring scheme. You can click on the color bars or input the exact values in the corresponding boxes just as easy.
When it comes to the placement of the overlay onto the photos, there are nine preset positions you could opt for by selecting any of them from the small grid. The alternative to this is to use the mouse and just move around the text until you discover its ideal position. There is something here though that spoils the fun, namely the inability to drag the text properly, like one would expect. All you can do is get clicky-clicky on the workspace and hope the mark will eventually land right where you wanted it.
An interesting option that you must try is the usage of a texture fill. You choose an image and it will be superimposed over the target but visible only through the watermark text body. By doing so, you will get some great looking effects, far better than the mere single color you can assign for the letters, even if it is accompanied by a different hue for the edges.
You can also use this application for creating a unique seal from scratch and save it for later use. The preview window becomes the canvas if you use the ''Clear Paintbox'' feature from right-click menu. Then you'll be able to add some color to the background, set the render quality and the smoothness of the characters.
Once all this tinkering is done, you can let the pictures pour in to receive stamping treatment. Fortunately, you'll be able to add them to the working list one by one or, if you'd rather, by the bucket, loading entire directories. Something you might not like here is the fact that the sub-folders are not automatically added and this requires, again, more clicks and thus more time invested in something that should have been an uncomplicated operation.
The management of the images you prepared to be watermarked isn't, however, resumed only to these actions. If, for any reason, you wish to remove some of the items you can easily select and exclude just them or, if you're really unhappy with the bulk of them, clear the entire list with a single click. A tip for you is to use the right-click magic again, this time inside the area where the files are shown, to reveal the entire list of available commands.
Moving along in order to come closer and closer to the ultimate goal of pressing the ''Start'' button, you will surely want to take a look at the settings for batch processing. They are not as numerous as one would suspect, but indispensable they certainly are because you'll be able to choose the output format and activate a fail-safe backup function to have all angles covered. Another thing you can activate from the same little tab is the random watermark placing, if you want to add some diversity to the task.
It's time now for a quick word on the supported file formats. If for the output the news are quite good with JPG, BMP, PNG and PDF available, the input is more of a let down since only the first two are recognized and usable. Also, some commonly used types like GIF or TIF are left out totally.
The actual processing is indeed fast and not too costly on system resources. For a set of 81 photos that weighed in at over 150 MB the processor usage peaked at 45 with a RAM consumption of maximum 18 MB. And it was all over in two minutes. The preferred output was PDF and the backup option activated so the overall performance is pretty decent, to say the least.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
The Good
The Bad
The Truth
This article is also availble in Spanish: Personalización y protección de las fotos digitales
