Purple Cabbage

This is an image that I created in Ultra-Fractal which is the fractal program I am using. It reminds me of cabbage thus the name.



In other news, I've torn my meniscus in my right knee. This is actually the second time I've done that. I did it in 2000 also. I'll be having surgery tomorrow.

New Fractal Image

I have been creating fractals and then using Photoshop to mess around with them. Here is one of my more successful ones.



I really like the background, I think it looks sort of like an old sidewalk.
If you are interested, the spiral is from the Mandelbrot set and I used
Ultra Fractal to render it.

Posting an Image

Well, here is my first image post.

This is a digital painting that hasn't been displayed anywhere before. When I put images up on my website, I didn't worry about anyone taking them. So I didn't worry about copyright notices. I am still not extremely worried about it but with all the fuss over copyright recently, I have it on my mind. Also, I did hear of a woman who set up a Cafe Press shop using the cool images she had found on the web.

So, anyway, I figured I would add copyright notices to anything I uploaded from now on...

Here is what I have done in case you are interested.

I am protecting my image five ways, which is probably overkill but it won't hurt anything. (I hope.)

The first way is that I am only uploading a small image.

The second is that I added a copyright notice along the bottom of the image.

The third is that the filename includes my name. (This is one I am worrying about.)

The fourth way is that I added copyright information to the file information in the file. A lot of image formats have a place to put extra information. An example of that is the EXIF information that cameras write to their photo files. The EXIF information includes data about when the photo was taken and camera settings at the time.

There are also slots for copyright information there. So I used it. In Photoshop CS3 that is under File/File Info...

After I added the information I saved the file several ways to try it out. It was saved in .jpg and .tif formats but not in .gif. Also, all the information was there when I did a File/Save As but only the copyright information was saved when I did a File/Save for Web.

The last way I included the copyright information is that I used a digital watermarking plug-in (from http://www.digimarc.com/) to add a digital watermark. You register with them and then you can use their plug-in to magically hide your secret code in the actual image. You do have to pay for that, and I'm not sure it is worth the money yet. As of last night it cost $79 for the bottom end package. That's what I got. That lets me embed my code in up to 1000 images total and I have to renew once a year.

If I had gotten the top end package at $499 a year then their web spider that would look for my images while it crawled the web. If I ever get famous and want to upgrade my package then it should be able to find the images I am marking now.

That is not working quite as slickly as it ought to. You are supposed to add the watermark last, but on my very first try, I added my visual notice after I had added the watermark and promptly erased the watermark. (And that used up one of my 1000 watermarks.) There are two links to their website to look me up and one is acting flaky for me. The link in the file information (next to the copyright notice that I added) worked before I saved the file, but after I saved a file and re-opened it, that link didn't work anymore. There is another link that their mark reader shows and it did still work -- but to see that you would need to know to look me up.

There is a 14 day money-back guarantee which I might use.