With the proliferation of social websites where people upload images for sharing, the ownership and re-use of digital pictures has become an important issue for photographers at all levels. When you publish a digital photo on a website – or provide it on a disk to a friend or customer – it’s wise to protect that image against illegal copying.
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With the proliferation of social websites where people upload images for sharing, the ownership and re-use of digital pictures has become an important issue for photographers at all levels. When you publish a digital photo on a website – or provide it on a disk to a friend or customer – it’s wise to protect that image against illegal copying. In this feature we explain two ways to protect your digital photographs.
Watermarking As long as the watermark covers the most significant parts of the image, anybody who wants to copy the image is unlikely to be able to remove it. Consequently, visible watermarks act as a deterrent to unauthorised copying. Watermarks can be almost anything, although best practice says text-based watermarks are most effective. Start with your name and/or logo plus a copyright notice (see below). You could also embed the URL for the website where most of your images appear. If your images are copied without permission, that link will lead viewers back to your site.
Most popular image editors include watermarking facilities. The basic procedure is as follows:  2. If you’re using Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, right-click on the type layer in the Layers palette and select Blending Options from the pop-up menu. Check the Bevel and Emboss box on the left panel of the dialog box. Then adjust the sliders in the right panel until you achieve the desired effect.  3. In the Layers palette, change the Blend mode for the type layer to Hard Light. Flatten the image in the Layers drop-down menu. 
Tips: 2. If you plan to use the same watermark for most of all of your images, save it to a file that can be dropped into an image at any time. 3. Watermarks are always editable. You can resize the type at any time with standard resizing tools and apply transformations by selecting Edit>Transform and choosing the transformation you want.  Corel Paint Shop Pro and Photo Paint have similar watermarking facilities to the Adobe applications. There are also a number of freeware and low-cost applications for watermarking, including PicMarkr (http://picmarkr.com/), iWatermark (www.scriptsoftware.com), Batch Waternark Creator (www.easy-tools.net) and Easy Watermark Creator (www.easyimagetools.com). Most provide trial downloads.
Embedding Copyright Although a copyright notice is not required for protection in Australia, where protection is automatic as soon as the photograph is taken, it is regarded as a useful way to notify people that the image is protected and identifies the person claiming the rights. The notice should contain the copyright symbol ( ©) followed by the name of the copyright owner and the year in which the image was first published. Embedded copyright notices become relevant if your image is used by somebody else without your permission as it can be used to prove your ownership of the image. This protection can also apply if your image is altered in a way you find unacceptable. Embedding copyright information is easy and there are a number of applications that enable you to do it, including freeware applications like Irfanview (www.irfanview.com) as well as regular image editors like Adobe’s Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. The method is similar for most applications. 1. Open the image file and click on File>File Info.  2. This opens the first page of a dialog box, which is headed ‘Description’. On this page you can enter information like the title of the picture, the name and title of the photographer, a description of the image and some keywords to make it easier to find in searches. You can also rate the image for future reference. Further down the page you will find an area for inputting copyright information. All that’s required is to set the Copyright Status box to Copyrighted and type in your copyright notice (as shown in the circled area). You can also add a link to your website.  3. Click on OK to complete the process. If you’re using older versions of Photoshop, you can also create an Action that will automatically add copyright information to a group of images. In more recent versions, it’s easier to embed copyright information in batches of images in Bridge. Simply Control-click (Mac: Command-click) on all the images you wish to add a copyright notice to then enter the information you want in the relevant IPTC field in the metadata palette. You can also add copyright information to batches of images with Irfanview – provided you have first installed the plug-ins provided for this application (which must be downloaded and installed separately). Select all the images you wish to use then click on File > Start batch dialog with selected files.  Click on Advanced in the Batch conversion settings dialog box then check Add overlay text in the Set for all images dialog box (circled in red).  Click on the Settings button beside it to open the dialog box that enables you to append copyright information to all images selected. When you click on the Append copyright button, the copyright symbol is automatically inserted into the Text box. Simply type in your own name beside it. You can also append date and time to your copyright message by clicking on the buttons beside this text box. 
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