Protecting your art online.

If you are posting images–even if they are not high resolution images—online, do you know that they can be easily reproduced and stolen? Did you know that even a 500 x 500 pixel, low resolution jpg (72 dpi) can be scanned, printed and sold?

They can. Very, very easily. It has happened to me. More than once.

Granted, the reproduction will not be as fine or high quality than if it was printed from the original, but a thief can get very usable print indeed. And then he/she can resell it–as posters, postcards, greeting cards, you name it.

Do I have your attention? Good.

When you post your work online, remember this: anybody can steal it. And most likely, someday, somebody will. You can put in a no-right click script, jumble your code, etc., but a simple little screenshot can grab it. It can end up as a greeting card or on millions of desktops as wallpaper or even as a poster print somewhere, and you will have not seen a dime from it.

The very worst thing you can do is to post high resolution artwork online. Even if you have it residing on your server, Google can find it if you don’t know how to configure your robots.txt file on your website. So…NEVER upload high resolution, printing-ready images unless they are in a locked directory and not displayed online.

So how do you protect yourself?

There is only one way: by watermarking. Digital watermarking, to be effective, needs to be visible. A watermark is your name, website url, copyright, etc, printed across the image in diminished opacity. Few thieves will want to bother with the extensive retouching required to remove it.

There are a few ways to watermark your images. There is watermarking software available (Google “watermarking software”) or do it yourself in Paintshop Pro, Photoshop, Photo Impact, Elements, etc. I believe even Picasa has a watermarking feature.

To do it yourself, open the image you want to watermark. Create a new type layer. Type your name, “sample”, or whatever you want on it. Make the text white if the image is dark, and black if the image is light. Diminish the layer’s opacity to about 20-30 percent, you decide which looks best.

For beveled watermarks that are transparent, make the type layer in “multiply” mode. Go to your layers palette with the layer selected, and click on “bevel emboss.”