Overlay border/watermark background

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:

  1. Allow specific (left, right, top, bottom) borders to be selected.
  2. Allow inset borders (perhaps via negative width).
  3. 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

1 Like

Those are good ideas!

We have actually already started on a similar node, called “Watermark Bar”. It’s just not done yet. But you can get a little preview of it by pasting the following into Terminal.app, pressing enter, and restarting Retrobatch:

defaults write com.flyingmeat.Retrobatch showPrivateNodes 1

It’ll show up under the Composite section. It only does size via scale of the image, but that might be good enough today for what you’re after. Otherwise, we’ll be adding more in the future.

What about allowing the user to apply effects like “Add Border” to the watermark? Maybe by using exclusive nodes which only have effect to the previous (or a group of) nodes?

@Tekl Why would it need to be exclusive? Is this so that it knows the location of the text, or some other reason?

Maybe my english ist too bad. :wink: With exclusive I mean, that a Node does not affect the cumulated output of all previous nodes but just the last node. Both are then combined with all other node results. Maybe it could look like this:

In addition to the good ideas :slight_smile:
I need the possibilty to configure a individual width of left, right, bottom an top and to insert a text in each border.