Easy Watermark Studio Lite for Windows

You're proud of your digital snapshots and want to share them without spreading them across the Internet. The solution is to watermark your pictures, just like Corbis, Life, and other big online archives do. Easy Watermark Studio Lite creates and places watermarks on single images or whole batches of pictures. It adds text and image watermarks, and it includes a variety of preconfigured watermarks that let you establish copyright, prohibit copying or unauthorized use, and other digital rights. It supports JPEG, BMP, and TIFF images. Easy Watermark Studio Lite is freeware, but it's also available in a Pro version that supports many more file types and includes extra filters, effects, and customer support options.

Easy Watermark's unique interface concentrates the most needed controls in tabs along the top edge, along with a profiles manager that lets users create watermark profiles for various uses. There's a search field for quickly retrieving profiles, too. To the right of the main window, there's a drop box for adding files that also has buttons for quickly adding files and folders for instant processing via an Execute button. We dragged an image into the box and clicked the first tab, Watermark layers. Under this tab we could access further tabs for adding text or image layers. The Lite version only adds single layers. Once we'd entered our text and set the opacity and size, we could move it around the image using directional arrows and fine-tune our watermark's position by dragging it into final position. We could also set margins, rotate our watermark, and tile it. Under the Other effects tab, we could round corners, configure the border outline, and set lines on the output image, but the image reflection and color conversion tools are disabled in the freeware. Finally, under Output settings, we could set the output directory and configure output file names, format, and size. By default, the program creates a folder in the system's Pictures folder.

If you're just looking to add watermarks to the digital snapshots and scans you post online, and your images are JPEGS, bitmaps, or TIFFs, it's hard to see how you need much more than Easy Watermark Studio Lite.