One technique I used for watermarking in other products was to put down a transparent overlay on which to lay the watermark.
Say the watermark is white text. It works well on darker images, but on lighter images there needs to be more contrast. This is solved by having a, say 50% opacity black rectangle laid underneath the watermark. The way I did it was to add a “border” that was inset into the image (total dimensions did not increase).
Retrobatch’s border capability is very simple (and what is that unit of measure BTW?) but could be expanded to allow this by the following added capability:
- Allow specific (left, right, top, bottom) borders to be selected.
- Allow inset borders (perhaps via negative width).
- Allow border opacity.
1 & 2 could also be achieved simply by having four dimensions settable.
These capabilities would also allow other creative effects like a captioned image where text appears on a thicker lower border.
An alternate (or perhaps complementary) approach would be to add background options (shadows, panels) to the text watermark node. Note that this background panel concept could probably be achieved via the image watermark node if it allowed scaling “to-fit” the image dimension, or tiling in a single direction (and also scaling as per text watermark).
Many ways to approach this! An example of my previous style can be seen here: KP181317 | zkarj | Flickr