Photoshop Ninja
Expert Photoshop tips and tricks for designers and photographers since 2005
Protecting your digital images from unauthorised usage Part 1
Protecting your hard work from unauthorised usage is of great importance to digital artists and photographers and there is many ways to effectively make your images viewable for approval, but almost unusable for anything else! Whether you are posting images out by email, or hosting them on your website – if you are worried about this issue all the information you need is right here!
I will cover digital watermarks (which would help you in a legal case-if it got that far!) in another tip. Digital watermarks are invisible to the naked eye and are the most robust technique to protect your images – they are even detectable in most image comps and printed versions! However, a digital watermark is not going to protect you against people stealing your image without you knowing for usage in smaller projects – for example off your website or out of a digital portfolio.
Firstly, dont put too high resolution images on the Internet (eg your website) – firstly it is no fun scrolling around images to view them if the browser doesnt support image resizing, and secondly it makes it more useable for potential thieves! You should aim to save you images down to no bigger than around 760 pixels wide (if landscape) or 440 pixels high (if portrait). This allows a reasonable viewing size that fits in the Internet browsers window, but pretty much unusable for print applications.
Second, JPEG compress the image with around medium to low quality – this will make it load quicker across the Internet and also degrade the quality – again making it not so useable for potential thieves! When they try and resize it it will bring out the compression artefacts even more!
Finally – put a visible watermark on the image, obviously this is not so good for online portfolios! My favourite technique is to make the watermark graphic in a new document and save it as a pattern (Edit-Define Pattern). Now you can use this in the future as an adjustment layer, making it quick and easy to apply to other images. You should drop down the opacity to make the image viewable underneath the watermark.
You should steer clear of relying on techniques like Java scripts that disable right click-save as in Internet Browsing software – this is easy to get around by simply doing a screen capture, as is embedding images in Flash movies.
Using the above techniques will make your image perfectly viewable for approval, but pretty much unusable for any commercial work. A repeating watermark across the image is usually just too much hassle for all but the most patient thief to re-touch out too.. could you be bothered?
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Written by Jonny Allbut - freelance graphic designer
Last modified: 22 December, 2005 (09:48) | First published: 22 December, 2005
Filed under Techniques - Other, Techniques - Web No Comments »
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