Presented by Rick Matteson and Brian Revere — How do you protect your designs from being stolen or used without payment nor permission? Say you have a web site advertising your paintings and you have a image of it. Just saying all rights reserved and copyright 2010 won't stop some people. A simple way to bolster protect against someone else using your work as their own is a simple visible or not so simple invisible watermark. Visible watermarks can be small, mainly textual off in a corner or larger and centered in the image. They could be logos. They could be opaque or mostly transparent relying on beveled edges or drop shadows. Plum Amazing makes the program iWatermark for Macs (Mac OS X 10.4 or newer) and the iPhone and those other guys (Win XP+) This $20 program, now at version 3.2 has been around since early 2004 back when it was known as Script Software. (The same company makes iKey and iClock Pro among others.) It's very simple to use, just drag into the window, a source and a destination folder, type some text and choose a background and effect to apply as the watermark to each image in the source folder. You can save waternark settings for reuse. It can also create thumbnails as it goes, which is most useful if you are creating a batch of images for a website. The iOS version can't do batches, but likewise can apply either a text watermark or a graphic watermark. For a iPhone, app, it's quite full featured. It's only 99 cents.
    If your images are already in iPhoto or Aperture, Blue Crowbar Software makes a watermark plugin for either of these, called Impression. Each plugin is $14.90. The Aperture version supports 64-bit Aperture version 3. While not quite a flexible as iWatermark, it may be far more convenient as getting to the source folders could be a problem with these image organizers. You can use a .psd or .png image for graphic watermarks or a .rtf file for a textual one. It works with Mac OS 10.5 or newer and iPhoto ʼ08 or ʼ09. The Aperture version works with Aperture 2.1 or 3 and also requires Mac OS 10.5.
    Another approach to protecting your work involves more complex documents like PDF files. When you go to print a document on the Mac OS X, you have a PDF button which is actually a menu, where you can save a PDF file with Security Options. You can have three options, Require password to open document, to copy text, images and other content and require a password to print the document. Thus you can give a customer a PDF preview of a document, but they can't easily recreate it by copying elements out of the file, but they can open it and read it for example. If you save a file from Photoshop as a PDF format, you get password security options there as well. The newer versions of PDF support ever more secure encyption, up to 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard. Acrobat Pro also allows you to add a watermark (Document menu). The watermark can be on specific pages or all pages or even or odd pages only. One of the clever options is to put the watermark behind the page where it would be invisible. Opening the PDF file in Illustrator, you could reveal the waternark. The sneaky part is they could be set up to only show when printing. MS Word doesn't offer any file security. Pages allows you to export as PDF where the Security Options are available.

Before we turn Rick and Brian loose, we’ll have our Q&A sessions, both Bradley's and the MacBasic one. Following the presentation, announcements and our very popular raffle will round out the the meeting. (There will not be any SIG sessions this month.)

This is going to be a vital meeting for Mac users of all types, so don’t miss it!

Of course before our MacBasics main demonstration we'll have our own novice Q&A session across the hall, while Bradley's dealing with the more complicated problems in the main room.