And it goes without saying – I would have never seen this day but for constant support from the best place on God’s green earth and very many friends from around the world – Thank you!!

As always, I know for a fact that I would have never seen this day but for constant support from the best place on God’s green earth and very many friends from around the world – Thank you!!

Thank you Karen & Adam!

I know for a fact that I would have never seen this day but for constant support from the best place on God’s green earth and very many friends from around the world – Thank you!!

Below given instructions are what I used to copyright my images on my Apple MacBook Pro running OS X v10.5.x and these may very well work for you. However, please note that you are using these instructions at your very own risk and this website, sgowtham.net, is not responsible for any/all damage caused to your property, intellectual or otherwise.

Most of us take photographs and many of us post them in this vast, nearly infinite internet. Inherent to this process is a desire to put our name on the pictures – either to protect them from plagiarism or to feed our ego or whatever other reason. There are many software and multiple ways to get this done. Although I don’t use this method all the frequently, I have tested it on CS2 and CS3 editions of Adobe Photoshop and you might find it useful. In one of my previous posts, I had discussed this process and what follows here is a series of steps to use another (smaller) image instead of text to copyright (or just overlay) the main image.

Get The Images Ready

Backup the original picture(s). Using Photoshop (or otherwise), resize your original picture to a reasonable size. 800×600 px is the approximate dimension of my resized picture.

Start The Process

Open the resized image in Photoshop and the screen should look something like:

We could continue this process assuming that there is only one picture to copyright but it is seldom the case. Let us assume that there is a folder full of images that need similar work and since doing all these steps one at a time for each picture can be laborious task, let us take the Photoshop Action approach. To this effect, pick a New Action from the Actions palette and give it a suitable name:

Click on Record and You should see the Red circular button in the Actions palette, indicating the recording is ON.

File → Open and select the image which will be used instead of (or in addition to) the copyright note.

Click on the small image and press the following key combination: cmd + A followed by cmd + C (ctrl + A followed by ctrl + C in Windows).

Click on the larger image (image to be copyrighted) and press the following key combination: cmd + V (ctrl + V in Windows).

Once the smaller image appears as on overlay on top of the larger image, smaller image needs to be properly aligned. To keep track, one may rename the layer that contains smaller image.

After the last four steps (assuming that you picked Bottom & Right Edges), the result should look something as follows. As one can note, the overlayed image is too close to the edges. To make it easily readable, select the Move tool and nudge the small image layer – both in upward and left directions – by a few keystrokes using the arrow keys.

Once that’s done, press the Blue square button in the Actions palette to STOP recording.

That’s it. Now this sequence of steps can be called as and when needed and the best part is that it can be used with other built-in features of Photoshop to work on folder full of images. Let us assume the following directory structure:

Pictures/Processing/Originals: contains a copy of the original, resized images.
Pictures/Processing/Copyrighted: will contain copyrighted images.

Pick the appropriate Quality. To add smaller image on all the resized images, check Run Action under Preferences and select Copyright_Images. Press Run and wait for the process to complete.

As one particular location of smaller image may not serve well for all images, it may be useful to create more Photoshop Actions – TopLeft, TopRight, BottomLeft and BottomRight – so on and use them as appropriate. It is quite important to retain the location of smaller image – otherwise the process might complain about not being able to find it.

Comments and/or suggestions, technical or otherwise, about this would be appreciated by myself as well as fellow readers.

Fast forward about 100 days – Marg introduced me to Doug Schmidt, an avid mineral collector (or A Rock Hound, as they like to call in Franklin Mineral Museum). After a short talk over phone, we decided to head up to these mines/mineral museums. Personally, meeting new cooler, nicer people who have similar interests is such a wonderful experience and this was no exception – our drive-along (along the scenic routes) discussions covered a variety of topics, mostly related to science, history and teaching.

Given that about 380 different minerals (out of about 3800 known to mankind) are found in this area – aptly known as the Fluorescence Capital of the World, tour of the two mines was very impressive. Rather ordinary looking and unattractive mineral specimen look divine (yeah divine, sexy is an understatment) under Ultra Violet radiation. The experience only gets better with very knowledgeable tour guides who explain things in an easily understandable manner, even for kids and first-timers. On a hot day when temperatures hovered around 90+° F, walking about 150 feet deep beneath the surface in Sterling Hill Mine – where the temperature was ~50° F – was certainly a blessing, considering all the new, cool things/facts I learnt.

These and other pictures, if you are interested, are here. All in all, it was certainly a very enriching day – in more ways than one and reminded a lot about the Seaman Museum, and the Quincy Mine (a full tour of which I am yet to take). I am most certain to back to these places and spend some quality time learning more about the minerals, history … and probably taking more pictures. If you are in that area and like minerals and know how to enjoy them, you should too

Take for example a normal, advanced amateur photographer or even pro-photographers – it’s not uncommon for them to have more than one camera as part of their arsenal. One for close-up/wide-angle shots, another for telephoto/zoom shots and so on. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that both those cameras are of the same type – say Nikon D200 (I have nothing against Cannon nor its users; the discussion applies equally well to just about any camera make and model). Let us further assume that after shooting a certain event, we have couple hundred pictures from each camera. Now comes part of the trouble (let us suppose that images are stored in RAW format):

When these pictures are transferred to the computers, it is quite possible that they have same names: such as DSC-0001.NEF, DSC-0002.NEF, …, DSC-0200.NEF That automatically prevents one from putting all 400 pictures into the same folder. If one were to make a folder by event’s date, say 20080328, then it must have two folders within: Camera1 and Camera2.

This can be easily avoided if, before starting to shoot pictures, one changes the filename convention in camera’s settings. For e.g., one of my Nikon D200 names its pictures as N2C-0001.NEF, N2C-0002.NEF, …. while the other one names them as N21-0001.NEF, N21-0002.NEF, … Then, all 400 pictures from the aforementioned psuedo-event could be put in the same folder, 20080328. But now comes another problem.

These advanced amateurs and/or pro-photographers shoot tons and tons of pictures. As soon as the picture count reaches N2C-9999.NEF, it starts all over again at N2C-0000.NEF. As such, if one’s archives contain 50,000 pictures, it is very likely that the same file name exists 5 times!

This can be easily avoided if one pays a little extra attention while transferring pictures from the camera to the computer. The first 10,000 pictures usually get created under a folder called 100 in the camera; next 10,000 under a folder called 101 and so on… This is something I like to call the Roll Index/Number. If I could somehow make this Roll Index/Number part of the file name, then each file name occurs only once in the archives! It’s easier said than done, especially if all one has access to is a Windows machine. For those with access to Linux and/or Macintosh machines, it’s relatively simple. I use the following home-made script to achieve this.

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#! /bin/bash
 
# I shoot in RAW mode and as such, pictures have an extension NEF
# Change it to JPG if you shoot in JPEG mode
 
#
# Part One: Convert filename to lowercase
#
for file in `ls *.NEF`;
do
  export lfile=$(echo $file | tr [A-Z] [a-z])
  echo "  Converting $file to $lfile"
  mv $file $lfile
done
#
 
#
# Part Two: Change their permission (optional step)
#
chmod 644 *.nef
#
 
#
# Part Three: Add Roll Index/Number to the Filename
#
# Camera One
export ROLL_INDEX="100"
 
for x in `ls n2c????.nef`
do
  if [ "${x}" != "" ];
  then
    echo "Working on $x"
    export IMAGE_NUMBER=`echo $x | awk -F 'n2c' '{print $2}'`
    mv $x n2c_$ROLL_INDEX-$IMAGE_NUMBER
  fi
done
 
# Camera Two
export ROLL_INDEX="100"
 
for x in `ls n21????.nef`
do
  if [ "${x}" != "" ];
  then
    echo "Working on $x"
    export IMAGE_NUMBER=`echo $x | awk -F 'n21' '{print $2}'`
    mv $x n21_$ROLL_INDEX-$IMAGE_NUMBER
  fi
done
#

So, after running this script inside the folder 20080328, all 400 images would have filenames like n2c_100-0001.nef, n2c_100-0002.nef, …, n2c_100-0200.nef and n21_100-0001.nef, n21_100-0002.nef, …, n21_100-0200.nef. All problems seemed to have been solved and world looks just fine? Not yet.

What if a group of photographers – who have similar, multiple cameras each and use the above technique to name their files – want to share files? A very common such scenario is a news paper or a journal or a magazine – say Sports Illustrated – which employs multiple photographers for a given event (e.g. Super Bowl or NBA Finals or something like that) and all photographs go into the archive. An event folder – 20080328 – in such an archive will have to have folders such as Photographer1, Photographer2, … and so on to avoid over-writing of files.

Even if the all the tens of thousands of photographs [Sports Illustrated shoots on an average 100,000 (yes, one hundred thousand) pictures during each Super Bowl] – named with roll index/number as part of their name – are put into individual photographer-folders, it is very likely that an image with same filename exists in multiple folders. This is where having a MAC address equivalent for a camera makes life so much easier.

Why not use the already existing Serial Number for this purpose?

Well, a Cannon and Nikon camera could have the same serial number and as such does not help in uniquely identifying a picture. The script that I used before could be modified to add serial number (and/or photographer’s initials) to the filename but it still wouldn’t be unique. Keeping in sync with the IPv6 revolution, it would be really great if all camera manufacturing ones (at least the leading ones to start with) can (keep aside their ego) and decide on this MAC Address Equivalent for Cameras. With this as part, an image’s filename may look something like

0012bfed4378_100-0000.nef, …, 0012bfed4378_100-9999.nef;
0012bfed4378_100-0001.nef, …, 0012bfed4378_101-9999.nef;
and so on.

What is the advantage? Unique identification of every picture that will ever be shot henceforth, making archiving and sharing pictures a very simple process. As not everybody has access to (or knowledge of) Linux/Mac machine, it will be lot less cumbersome if the camera itself generated such filenames to begin with.

What is the disadvantage? A rather long name for a simple picture. But hey, if we can remember Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck or Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger or Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, this is no different!

So, Cannon, Nikon, Fuji, Sony, Leica, …. I hope you are reading this and my comment-form (as well as the Inbox) is waiting for your comments/opinions.

After a gloomy 40 mile drive spanning about an hour early in the morning, I found myself in aesthetically & architecturally pleasing Princeton University campus. The weather – owing to night-long rain – was much colder than I had anticipated (ended up using hand warmers). And probably because of the same reason, in addition to the fact that it was a Saturday, the campus seemed pretty empty. As such, I didn’t have to worry about people running in front of my camera or asking me questions and such. I must confess – that in spite of spending four hours – I could cover only a tiny part of the campus and as such, can imagine myself paying many more visits. Below are some of the shots:

The drive towards Princeton University

Something Interesting…

Coffee….

Holder Hall

Thanks to readings of science history, dear friend Pradeep, a camera store owner & a cop in Princeton, I got to know where exactly was the house where Einstein lived. On my way along the streets of Princeton, I did find more interesting entities:

The street where Einstein lived….

The house where Einstein lived…

Rest of the pictures from this trip are here.

It’s pretty hard to explain my excitement – growing up on the other side of planet earth and reading up on the biographies of many a great minds (mostly scientists – mostly physicists), it was always a dream to see this (along with many other) institutions. And today, I can check Princeton off of that list Not only I like the University’s architecture and it’s heritage/history, I have – yes, just in one visit – developed a serious liking for the town as well. And as I mentioned before, I will be visiting this place for more reasons than one in the weeks to come.

The Preparation

Well, it all started in early October (2007) – receiving an invite and confirming that I would attend the event. Little did I know that Jess would have the last laugh – as much as I tried declining, she kept coming up with more reasons to convince me otherwise. This meant that I not only had to pack my clothes but carry another 40lbs of equipment. It also meant talking to several people, the groom included; read/study and understand the technicalities of the process and such… As much as I hate doing things in the last minute, I did screw something up: inadvertently, I left a ball point pen amongst the formal set of clothes during laundry and you know the rest….

The Journey

It began in the early hours of Friday, 25th January and had the added advantage of having to drive across the bridge – The Mackinac Bridge. Just like the seemingly endless shores of Lake Superior, sight of this bridge and the feeling driving across it never gets old – at least to me. Considering that my very first planned vacation in US centered around this bridge; that I missed the Bridge Walk on 50th Anniversary; and that I have never seen it during Winter. I was all pumped up for this trip, to say the least. Thanks to a nice person at the gas station in St. Ignace, I found a decent place to take pictures of…

The Bridge – built across the Mackinaw Strait; the bridge (about 5 miles end-to-end) connects Michigan’s Upper & Lower Peninsula and the Mackinaw Strait connects Lake Michigan and Lake Huron

Much of the ride was trouble free, except for about 30 minutes around Gaylord (snowy/icy roads, traffic backlogs, …) and the last 30 minutes in Warren (diagonal road structure, non-square blocks, …) – reaching the destination about an hour later than I had originally planned but fortunately, I wasn’t too late for anything. And my GPS did a pretty good job of routing me and I am pretty proud of it

The Festivities

It didn’t take too long for the festivities to begin – started out with a short trip to the Tux Shop in Sterling Heights Mall; harassing already stressed out Jess about a variety of things – stressing her even more; dinner with both families and friends; and an informal rehearsal at a friend’s place. Given that I had driven 9+ hours and the Tux Shop proceedings took longer than expected giving us no time to dress up, I hope I didn’t stink (literally) too much. Even if I did, thanks to my table-mates for keeping mum about it – appreciate it

During our conference conversation (Tim, Kyle and yours-truly), Tim had made it pretty clear that he (or him and Jess) didn’t want too many of posed pictures and that if he were to pick five pictures, they should make a photo-essay of sorts. This had its share of advantages as well as disadvantages: opportunity to shoot candid shots (advantage) and if I miss something, it’s gone – there would be no re-enactment (big disadvantage).

I could not easily pick just five to write my photo-essay, if I were to write one… If my arms were twisted so bad to pick just one picture to write the photo-essay, the one below would be it…

Scott Schneider – with his better half frowning (at me and at him) from behind…

If there was choice between having fun and having fun recording others having fun, I would rather pick the latter – and this event certainly let me have plenty of it. Got to meet quite many newer, nicer and interesting people; hang out with some old acquaintances; enjoy good food, great live music, …

Back To Paradise

Having had too much fun, it took me a while to get set for another 9+ hour drive – only this time, I didn’t have to reach at any given time and the only pressure was to make it safe and sound – in one solid piece. Weather gods, traffic gods, GPS unit, … co-operated very well and after a pleasant ride, here I am – back in paradise, processing rest of the pictures and continuing to wait for the arrival of a certain some document….

Pictures from this aforementioned event will appear here – once Jess & Tim approve of it. I am glad we (Kyle and myself) didn’t miss photographically recording much of the festivities. I am very much appreciative of Jess’ trust and I hope that I lived up to her expectation…

Not that I didn’t want to trust my memory and/or hiking/mapping skills, but the aforementioned experience coupled with neophelia and a long time habit of recording (in detail) geography led me to buy my first hand held GPS unit. Magellan eXplorist 210 North America seemed pretty sufficient at the time of purchase: It did its part in helping me get coordinates of many a wonderful places in this beautiful neck of the woods. However, lack of detailed maps, only 22MB of available memory and no facility to add more storage soon started becoming problematic features

Needless to say, neophelia struck again around Christmas of 2007 and after a bit of (re)search, I decided to go with Garmin GPSMap 60CSx. Customizable storage (accepts microSD cards); smart display (distinguishes day from night); decent navigation instructions even with basemap; 12 channel SiRFstar III high-sensitivity GPS receiver (WAAS-enabled) continuously tracks and uses up to 12 satellites to compute and update the position; built-in quad helix receiving antenna, with external antenna connection (MCX); data transfer (to/from a computer) via standard USB cables; approximately 18 hours of battery life … I am totally hooked to this thing. In order to miniaturize the chances of me printing driving directions in future, I added a 2GB 8GB microSD card and all of 1066 maps (covering almost all of North America) from MapSource MetroGuide v8.

One thing that totally pissed me off about MapSource was that it’s a MS Windows only application. As much as I would have loved to see no trace of Microsoft products on my computer, this (and couple other things) have forced me to put an instance of Windows under Parallels on my Apple MacBook Pro

Left: GPS, Manual, MapSource MetroGuide and 9-pin Cable
Right: Close up of Downtown Houghton

As it can be seen from the above snapshots, with the addition of MapSource Metroguide maps, the information displayed is pretty exhaustive – even our very own downtown Houghton has vivid details (yes, we do have a downtown and yes, the downtown does have business establishments) although Michigan Technological University (my school) is still listed as Michigan College of Mining & Technology (a name whose last official usage was in 1964), College Avenue still goes right through the Michigan Tech Campus (College Ave & US41 are the same for a while) and some streets/roads are missing.

Added bonus is that there are couple ways in which I can use this GPS unit with my Nikon D200 [currently, I add POI (Points of Interest) in my GPS, then add them manually to the image description - as can be seen from many pictures in my showcase]:

1. With Nikon MC-35 GPS Adapter Cord (this thing costs about $100 and I have absolutely no idea why) and the 9-pin cable from Garmin, camera can record GPS coordinates into the EXIF data in pictures.
2. Almost every GPS unit saves track log – a table containing GPS coordinates recorded at regular intervals of time. Once these track logs are imported to the computer, one can use GPSPhotoLinker (on Apple OS X) to add the GPS information to EXIF data.

My Settings On This Unit

• Main Menu → Setup → System
  • GPS [Normal]
  • WAAS/EGNOS [Enabled]
  • Battery Type [Alkaline]
  • Text Language [English]
  • External Power Lost [Stays On]
  • Proximity Alarms [On]
• Main Menu → Setup → Interface
  • Serial Data Format [Garmin]
• Main Menu → Setup → Page Sequence
  • Include All [Re-order if necessary]
• Main Menu → Setup → Map
  • General: Orientation [Track Up]
  • General: Below [800ft]
  • General: Auto Zoom [Off]
  • General: Detail [Most]
  • General: Lock on Road [On]
  • Tracks: Saved Tracks [Auto]
  • Tracks: Track Log [800ft]
  • Tracks: Track Points [10000]
  • Tracks: Go To Line [Bearing]
  • Points: Map Points [800ft]
  • Points: User Waypoints [800ft]
  • Points: Street Label [800ft]
  • Points: Land Cover [800ft]
  • Text: Map Points [Medium]
  • Text: User Waypoints [Medium]
  • Text: Street Label [Medium]
  • Text: Land Cover [Medium]
  • Marine: Marine Colors [On]
  • Marine: Spot Soundings [On]
  • Marine: Light Sectors [On]
  • Marine: Symbol Set [Auto]
• Main Menu → Setup → Display
  • Display Mode [Auto]
  • Day Time Color Scheme [Topaz]
  • Night Time Color Scheme [Peridot]
  • Backlight Time Out [Stays On]
  • Backlight Level [100%]
• Main Menu → Setup → Tones
  • Message Beep [#1]
  • Key Beep [Off]
  • Power Beep [#3]
  • Turn Warning (Early) [#17]
  • Turn Warning (Final) [#8]
  • Proximity Alarm Tones: Upcoming Speed Alert [#5]
  • Proximity Alarm Tones: Proximity Alarm Beep [#7]
  • Proximity Alarm Tones: Leaving Proximity Beep [#5]
  • Proximity Alarm Tones: Approaching Proximity Beep [#11]
  • Proximity Alarm Tones: Proximity Alarms [Check]
• Main Menu → Setup → Routing
  • Guidance Text [Prompted]
  • Follow Road Method [Prompted]
  • Next Turn Pop-up [On]
  • Follow Road Options: Off Route Calculation [Auto]
  • Follow Road Options: Calculation Method [Best Route]
  • Follow Road Options: Calculate Routes for [Car/Motorcycle]
  • Follow Road Options: Avoid [Unchecked all]
• Main Menu → Setup → Time
  • Time Format [24 Hour]
  • Time Zone [US Eastern]
  • UTC Offset [-05hrs 00min]
  • Daylight Savings Time [Auto]
• Main Menu → Setup → Units
  • Position Format [hddd.ddddd°]
  • Map Datum [WGS 84]
  • Distance/Speed [Statute]
  • Elevation [Feet (ft/min)]
  • Depth [Feet]
  • Temperature [Fahrenheit]
  • Pressure [millibars]
• Main Menu → Setup → Heading
  • Display [Cardinal Letters]
  • North Reference [User]
  • Magnetic Variation [000°]
  • Switch to Compass heading when below [3mph] for more than [180s]
• Maps
  • Data Fields: 4 Data Fields [ETA At Destination/Sunrise/Sunset ; Time To Next/Odometer ; Bearing ; Time of Day]
  • Guidance Text: Show When Navigating
  • Turn Declutter: Off
• Tracks
  • Track Log [On]
• Tracks → Setup
  • Wrap When Full
  • Record Method: Time
  • Interval: 00hrs 00min 03sec
  • Color: Dk Blue
  • Data Card Setup [Log Track To Data Card]

I am looking forward to using this unit with my subsequent expeditions – photography related and/or otherwise. If you happen to know some tricks, tips, suggestions that would help me optimize the usage, please post them as comments: I will greatly appreciate them

Disclaimer

Below given instructions are what I used to copyright my images on my Apple PowerBook G4 running OS X v10.4.10 and these may very well work for you. However, please note that you are using these instructions at your very own risk and this website, sgowtham.net, is not responsible for any/all damage caused to your property, intellectual or otherwise.

Get The Images Ready

Backup the original picture(s). Using Photoshop (or otherwise), resize your original picture to a reasonable size. 720×540 px is the dimension of my resized picture.

Start The Process

Open the resized image in Photoshop and the screen should look something like:

We could continue this process assuming that there is only one picture to frame/copyright but it is seldom the case. Let us assume that there is a folder full of images that need similar work and since doing all these steps one at a time for each picture can be laborious task, let us take the Photoshop Action approach. To this effect, pick a New Action from the Actions palette and give it a suitable name:

Click on Record and You should see the Red circular button in the Actions palette, indicating the recording is ON.

Select Layer ⇒ New ⇒ Layer From Background. Give the background layer a name (I call it MainPicture).

Select Layer ⇒ New Fill Layer ⇒ Solid Color. Give the fill layer a name (I call it BlackBackground) and pick a color of your choice from the subsequent dialog box.

The result should look something like below.

Now, just swap the MainPicture and BlackBackground layers in Layers palette (this can be dragging BlackBackground layer to be below MainPicture). The result should look something like below:

Now, it’s time to add the matte/frame. Select Image ⇒ Canvas Size.

I chose 20 pixels for Width, 60 pixels for Height with With Relative checked and with center Anchor. The result should look like below – the main picture middle-centered in the resized canvas.

Select the Move Tool (M), select the MainPicture layer in Layers palette and nudge it up by 20 keystrokes. This should result in the top, left and right margins/frames to be 20px in width, and bottom one to be 40px.

Select the Text Tool (T) and type in the copyright note anywhere on the bottom frame of canvas. To get the © symbol in Mac, use Option+g key combination. Pick any font of your choice and add additional effects to your heart’s content.

With the copyright/text layer still hightlighted, do the following:

You can select Left Edges if you wish

After the above steps (assuming that you picked Right Edges), the result should look something like:

As one can note, the copyright notice is too close to the edges. To make it easily readable, nudge the copyright/text layer – both in upward (12 keystrokes) and left (10 keystrokes) directions using the arrow keys.

Once that’s done, press the Blue square button in the Actions palette to STOP recording.

That’s it. Now this sequence of steps can be called as and when needed and the best part is that it can be used with other built-in features of Photoshop to work on folder full of images. Let us assume the following directory structure:

Pictures/Processing/Originals: contains a copy of the original images.
Pictures/Processing/Resized: will contain resized images.
Pictures/Processing/Copyrighted: will contain copyrighted images.

First, the original images need to be resized. Photoshop provides a built-in feature to accomplish this task.

Pick the appropriate Resize to fit & Quality values and press Run. Once the process is complete, one can find the resized images in JPEG folder under Pictures/Processing/Resized. To add copyright note on all the resized images, start the Image Processor, select appropriate folders (for source and destination), add other File Types if necessary, check the Run Action under Preferences and select MyFramedCopyright from Default Actions set. Press Run and wait for the process to complete.

As one particular location of copyright note may not serve well for all images, it may be useful to create more Photoshop Actions – TopLeft, TopRight, BottomLeft and BottomRight – so on and use them as appropriate.

Comments and/or suggestions, technical or otherwise, about this would be appreciated by myself as well as fellow readers.

Disclaimer

Below given instructions are what I used to copyright my images on my Apple PowerBook G4 running OS X v10.4.10 and these may very well work for you. However, please note that you are using these instructions at your very own risk and this website, sgowtham.net, is not responsible for any/all damage caused to your property, intellectual or otherwise.

Get The Images Ready

Backup the original picture(s). Using Photoshop (or otherwise), resize your original picture to a reasonable size. 720×540 px is the dimension of my resized picture.

Start The Process

Open the resized image in Photoshop and the screen should look something like:

We could continue this process assuming that there is only one picture to copyright but it is seldom the case. Let us assume that there is a folder full of images that need similar work and since doing all these steps one at a time for each picture can be laborious task, let us take the Photoshop Action approach. To this effect, pick a New Action from the Actions palette and give it a suitable name:

Click on Record and You should see the Red circular button in the Actions palette, indicating the recording is ON.

Select the Text Tool (T) and type in the copyright note anywhere on the canvas. To get the © symbol in Mac, use Option+g key combination. Pick any font of your choice and add additional effects to your heart’s content.

Optional Step: If you prefer the copyright note to be vertical instead of horizontal, select/highlight the copyright/text layer (in Layers palette) and do the following:

Irrespective of whether the note is horizontal or vertical, it needs to be properly aligned. With the copyright/text layer still hightlighted, do the following:

You can pick Left Edges if you wish

You can pick Top Edges if you wish

After the above four steps (assuming that you picked Right & Bottom Edges), the result should look something like:

As one can note, the copyright notice is too close to the edges. To make it easily readable, nudge the copyright/text layer – both in upward and left directions – by a few keystrokes using the arrow keys. Once that’s done, press the Blue square button in the Actions palette to STOP recording.

That’s it. Now this sequence of steps can be called as and when needed and the best part is that it can be used with other built-in features of Photoshop to work on folder full of images. Let us assume the following directory structure:

Pictures/Processing/Originals: contains a copy of the original images.
Pictures/Processing/Resized: will contain resized images.
Pictures/Processing/Copyrighted: will contain copyrighted images.

First, the original images need to be resized. Photoshop provides a built-in feature to accomplish this task.

Pick the appropriate Resize to fit & Quality values and press Run. Once the process is complete, one can find the resized images in JPEG folder under Pictures/Processing/Resized. To add copyright note on all the resized images, start the Image Processor, select appropriate folders (for source and destination), add other File Types if necessary, check the Run Action under Preferences and select MyCopyright from Default Actions set. Press Run and wait for the process to complete.

As one particular location of copyright note may not serve well for all images, it may be useful to create more Photoshop Actions – TopLeft, TopRight, BottomLeft and BottomRight – so on and use them as appropriate.

Comments and/or suggestions, technical or otherwise, about this would be appreciated by myself as well as fellow readers.

I am proud to say nearly 5000 of them have survived the test of my eyes and post-processing skills (as trained by many dear friends and their priceless suggestions). Though I would love to improve the survival rate (currently less than 25%), I am kinda satisfied with what I have. If you have time and are eager, you may check some of them here or all of them there.

Couple of fellow graduate students did their prelims and our Department, as it has been the tradition, hosted Spring Feedback Pizza Party. Many of the new students complained about weather conditions and qualifiers, while yours truly, as usual, brought up physerver disk usage and aging issues. During this meeting, it was also mentioned that some old machines in the Physics Grad Lab would be replaced with new ones. Upon hearing this, after the meeting, I proposed to the department about using them to set up a Cluster Work Bench. When built, this cluster work bench will serve as good instructional resource, and other reasons for this proposal are as follows:

1. CPU cylces can be used instead of the machines sitting idle in some closet
2. People (faculty and students alike) who would like to learn building a clusters (a.k.a. getting their hands dirty), can do so
3. Research groups planning to have a cluster of their own, can learn proper usage techniques
4. Research groups that have a cluster already, may use it as a not-so-risky platform to test new compilations
5. Some others, who may not be in a position to afford a cluster, can get their research done
6. This set up can also be used for small Summer projects, course-work projects, etc
7. Since we (dept) need to pay for disposal, part of that disposal money can be used to pay for network connection

For the last few days, I have been somewhat occupied with preparing slides for the upcoming APS meeting in Baltimore, and we have couple of practice talks scheduled in the next week. Almost all preparations from my side are done – request for leave of absence, transportaion (air and local), list of talks to attend, list of other (non-research) things to do, complete mailing address of all people I am planning to visit (I still have to print driving directions though), … Hopefully, everything will go according to the plan. Preparations are also underway (thanks to Kyle Schneider) for attending the PenguiCon 4.0, in Livonia, just the weekend before Tech finals. I have nothing to worry about as I have no finals to take I am about to complete planning for the conference in Cochin (India), later this year – should be fun times, to meet my teachers and friends….

Coming to other things, Tech basketball teams (both men and women) lost in the GLIAC quarter-finals. David Otokpa has promised me to send his comments/suggestions about my photos and I am eagerly looking forward to that. I have also been planning to find a new place to live – not that there is anything wrong with the current place, but with quite a few friends planning to visit me in the next three semesters or so, it will be a good idea to have a separate place. I had signed a contract too, for a place in Hancock, but have requested them to cancel it as a result of some unforeseen circumstances. Over the last few days, I was informed about this website, kalyanvarma.net and the wildlife photos (in and around Karnataka, India) are just too good. I modified certain parts of my website, mostly related to photo gallery, to make them more user-friendly. After some struggle, searching around and LUG members’ help, I have managed to get Kannada fonts in Mozilla Firefox under Linux (Red Hat Enterprise). This means that I no longer have to boot my laptop in Windows just to read some of my friends’ blogs. A fellow graduate student told me the best computer-related joke ever….

When Microsoft finally makes a product that doesn’t suck, it will be a Vacuum Cleaner!

Until next time, have fun