Can someone remove a watermark please?

[Derrel]

Here we go...

How To Stone A Person To Death

 

[480sparky]

Again, refresh my memory as to when I said this...........

As you wish.

...... but it seems to me that the people who are most vocal about the "evils of piracy" always end up being the ones with the most pirated crap on their computer.............

 

[Josh66]

Yes, selectively quoting posts is fun for everyone. If you had read the rest you would have noticed the part where I mentioned that it was just a general observation and not related to this thread.

Your insistence on continually bringing it up does make me wonder though. YOU (and Tailgunner) are the ones making this an issue. Personally, I do NOT care if you pirate software. All I did was make an observation that "guilty parties" tend to profess their innocence when it isn't really called for. Kind of like you guys are doing now. If you didn't feel that applied to you, I guess the best thing would have been to simply ignore it.

 

[robbins.photo]

Here we go...

How To Stone A Person To Death

No video? Geez.. what a rip off.. lol

 

[robbins.photo]

Personally, I do NOT care if you pirate software.

Aha! Just as we suspected. Caught you red handed there blackbeard!

Lol.. hey, you know this selective quoting thing might be pretty fun after all. Thanks Josh! Rotfl

 

[Josh66]

Arrgh.


Where's my rum?





The whole "piracy" thing is pretty much a non-issue for me. All of the software I use is open source and free (excluding one or two games). I just think it's funny that people who supposedly don't pirate anything get so worked up when piracy is mentioned.

 

[robbins.photo]

Arrgh.


Where's my rum?





The whole "piracy" thing is pretty much a non-issue for me. All of the software I use is open source and free (excluding one or two games). I just think it's funny that people who supposedly don't pirate anything get so worked up when piracy is mentioned.

Well I've always been a big fan of buying the stuff I need for a variety of reasons, first of course is that if no one buys the software the company goes out of business and no more development. I've also never quite figured out why folks would run the risk of a serious viral infection or worse, I would think that pirated software would pretty much be a primary candidate for something like that - me I'd rather spend a few extra bucks so I never have to worry about it.

I can't really go the opensource route for a lot of stuff, particularly my OS. I also use some 3d software called Poser and 3ds Max, neither of which will run on anything but windows. You can kind of sort of get poser, the 32 bit version, limping under a couple of different versions of linux but it's far to unstable and running anything less than the 64 bit version on my machine is a waste. So for now I'm stuck with mickeyslop I'm afraid. And no, blender is just not an viable replacement for either, not even close. At some point I'd love to take the graphics workstation and convert it over to linux, but I'll have to wait until wine gets a whole lot better than it is now before i can even consider it, either that or when virtualbox or vmware finally pull their heads out and allow a VM direct video card access. Then maybe I can look at finally doing away with Windows for good, but until then I'm kinda stuck.

I have played with the Giimp a bit, but I own an older copy of photoshop and I really prefer it's interface so I'll be sticking with it for the foreseeable future. But for now at least what I've got gets the job done well enough.

 

[Josh66]

I've always hated Wine - I could never get it to run good. VirtualBox is not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than Wine, IMO. The only real down side is that it requires a copy of Windows (or whatever other OS you want to run). I very rarely use it though - just don't really need Windows much at all for what I do.

 

[AceCo55]

Clone away. Perfectly legal. End of discussion.



You guys are getting way too defensive, lol. I wasn't talking about anything I've seen in this thread. Although some people seemed to be implying that it was illegal.

You do NOT have permission to remove the watermark. I strongly suspect the terms and conditions for using the trial software would cover that.
Plus its not a cool thing to do.

Like that. ^^^

First sentence, boldly stating that you do not have permission to alter it. Second sentence, admitting that he didn't actually know whether you had permission or not.




I even said that the OP should go ahead and buy it. If he was only going to use this software once or twice - yeah, clone that **** out. If you're going to be using it on anything even resembling a regular basis, that would get old very fast.



EDIT
lambertpix,
The rest of your post (unquoted), I totally get and agree with. That was never in question. I fully understand why the watermark is there, and I would even say that it should be a very effective model. Who would rather clone watermarks out of hundreds of images when you could just prevent them from appearing in the first place for a small fee. A very small fee, once you factor in all that time that would otherwise be spent cloning crap out.

I would not pay $40 to process one HDR. I'm not really that much into HDR, but that's beside the point. If I was into it, I sure as hell wouldn't want to waste all that time cloning out watermarks when I could 'unlock' the software so easily.


My point is, cloning the watermark out does not make you a pirate.

And your example of delivering watermarked images to a client ... proofs, yes - watermark them. Proofs only need to be good enough for me to tell if it's 'print-worthy' or not. I personally would not pay for watermarked images (prints, or files meant to be printed by the end user) though.

You know or should know what the intent of that watermark is in their trial software. The company made a conscious decision to place that watermark on each image when the software was being trialled. Again you either know that or you should.
Whether YOU think is is legal or not is immaterial to me - If you can claim that it is OK to remove a watermark from trial software without any pangs of consciousness tells me you are not a person I would like to have anything to do with ... you seem to be a person who is willing to do what you want to do regardless of the situation.
Now to find out how I can "ignore" you. Have a happy life.

 

[jenko]

Stealing is stealing. There are real people behind these products who dedicate hours of time and work to create them for us. They should get paid for their efforts.

Sounds like someone has some growing up to do.

 

[Josh66]

Now to find out how I can "ignore" you. Have a happy life.

Yes, I am such a child because I believe that it is not stealing to edit my own photos.

edit
Jenko, I think if you go back and read my posts in this thread again you will find that I am not in disagreement with you. It's just that this is simply not "stealing", or piracy. They are YOUR photos, you can do with them what you want. The EULA agrees with this.


AceCo55, if you must add me to your "ignore list" for calling you out, then go ahead and do it. I guess it's easier than admitting that you were wrong.

The fact is, there is nothing wrong with cloning the watermark out. I have said multiple times in this thread that I understand why they watermark the trial images - and even that it is an effective model to convince people to buy it.

I am done repeating myself, so in the future I will just assume that people who can't let this go are either stupid or trolls.

 

[AceCo55]

Just thought I would provide an update to this question. I contacted Photomatix Support about the watermark on the trial version. This is their position:

"We don't have something spelled out in black and white about it, but I can touch on it for you.

Our position about removing the watermark without buying the software is absolutely the same as yours, and people who say otherwise are being dishonest. I wouldn't be surprised if those people know that, too, even if they claim otherwise.

The point of the watermark is indeed to be a limit on the trial version of Photomatix; since it's fully functional and doesn't expire (because we believe that people should have ample time to try out the software before buying, and we understand that sometimes things get busy and not everyone has time to test the software during a limited time frame), the watermark is there to prevent people from indefinitely using the trial without ever buying a license. As you know, after the product is registered, it doesn't add watermarks (and it also has an option to remove them from previously processed photos).

We may well have a case against people that do such things, but unfortunately if we were to try to take everybody that was cheating in some way to court, it would quickly cost us so much time and money that we wouldn't be able to keep developing Photomatix Pro. And, the people that do these types of things usually find it easier to find a pirated license key than have to follow a procedure to remove the watermarks, which is even harder to fight.

So, while the opening poster and the person that came to his defense are not in the right, there isn't a lot we can do about it without taking resources away from bettering our product, and we've decided to devote our energy to our honest customers and hope that some of the others come around."