Software Review:
Adobe Photoshop 4.0
Part 3
By Scott Clark
Digital Watermarking for Web Graphics?
Multicolor gradients
Photoshop 4 features Multicolor gradients, linear and radial gradients with multiple colors and varying levels of opacity. The gradient tool is easy to use, and you can add the gradient to the entire image, a selected area of the image, or directly to an object.
Multiple Filters
The tool comes with more than 90 filters that offer many artistic effects, including colored pencil, crosshatch, film grain, and more. 48 of the filters are new, and used to be offered as a stand-alone product called Adobe Gallery Effects. These filters are very useful for adding effects to your images.
Digital watermarking
Digital watermarking enables professionals to protect the copyright of their images. Web graphics designers will find this feature to be a godsend if they are worried about their graphics being copied and used elsewhere on the Web.
The watermark is not visible to the human eye, but it is still viewable (to Photoshop) even after an image has been edited, or printed and scanned in. Photoshop reads the watermark in the image, and a link in the program allows you to access the Digimarc Web site, where you can get copyright and artist information for the registered images.
To place a watermark on the image, you select Filters, Watermark from the menu, and you can choose which type of watermark to use, and can even personalize it by using your own CreatorID. If you don't already have such an ID, you click a button in Photoshop and it connects you to the Digimark Creator ID Web site. A watermark does increase the size of the image, in my case from 5KB to 13KB, and you must save the image in JPEG format (See Figures 2 & 3).
Figure 2. The image in GIF format: 5KB
Figure 3. The watermarked image in JPEG format: 13KB
This article first appeared in April, 1998.
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