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Aperture Watermark Bug and a Workaround
One of my favorite features in Aperture is the ability to generate emails containing selected images containing customized watermarks, with just a single click on the email icon. To set this up, first go to Preferences >Export, choose your mail application and desired Email preset size. Click the Edit popup menu to access all the file formats, size and bit depth options as well as the option to use a watermark. Note that you must create the watermark separately - and then save the watermark image. (I described this in detail in a blog awhile ago, Creating a Dimensional Watermark.)
Unfortunately even when you have everything set correctly, the watermark will not automatically appear in emails generated by Aperture 2.0. The engineers are aware of this and are correcting it. But in the meantime to send emails with a watermark embedded you’ll need to export the correctly sized JPEGs to a folder, create a droplet in Photoshop to apply a watermark (a droplet is like an action but can be run on a folder of images,) and apply the droplet. Then if you’re using Mail, go to Attach and navigate to the desired image(s) or drag the folder into the Projects pane, select the images you want to send and press the email icon. It's just a temporary inconvenience, but it reminds me how often I rely on this feature.
Comments (11)
It's more inconvenience than necessary...
Watermarks appear to be working fine for 'normal' exports, so export direct from Aperture to the Finder using the export preset that you set up. Then drag the images into the email or hit the attach button and navigate to the folder. No need to involve Photoshop at all.
Ian
Thanks Ian - I hadn't tried it that way.
Happy to help. ;-)
It may work for Ian, but I just had a chance to test it and even using a regular export, the watermark feature in Aperture is not working for me. Perhaps there's a difference in which file formats, sizes or styles of watermarks are affected.
Curiouser and curiouser. I can replicate the email function not adding watermarks, but exporting regular Versions (both from RAW & JPEG) to JPEG with a watermark is working fine for me.
Ian
It will work with regular exports if you select an export size option for which you previously set a watermark file in Preferences > Export. So, if you only attached a watermark file to 'Email Medium-JPEG' in Preferences, then you will only get the watermark added if you select 'Email Medium-JPEG' in File > Export > Versions....
Sean, thank you for solving the mystery! I indeed was testing by creating a new export with watermark and it didn't work.
The link to the earlier article is: http://blogs.oreilly.com/aperture/2007/07/creating-a-dimensional-waterma.html . Ellen, you may want to correct it in your entry as you've linked instead to the MovableType administrative back-end instead.
Thanks Erik, I appreciate you catching that and including the link. It's been corrected in the blog.
Ellen
There is another bug with watermarks in that the scale feature does not work properly if you have heavily cropped an image. A watermark that scales correctly, with the scale feature checked, for exporting the whole image seems to give a watermark that is too big if it has been substantially cropped during editing prior to export. This certainly deserves correcting soon I should think.
I want to use aperture to put up a stock photo site. Using my current aperture albums (which are nicely divided into stock subjects). I have not upgraded to version 2 yet.
I want to know if you can add watermarks automatically to all images that are included in a web gallery?
This is an important feature - as designers like to download samples from stock sites and use them in mock ups to see if the shot works. Hence, having a download enabled file with a watermark on it is a must.
Does Aperture 2 allow this?
Thanks,