Protecting Artwork?

[Stitch Up]

Morning guys

As I put more of our artwork on our website I need to consider protecting it in some way.

We've often commissioned graphic designers to produce artwork for us and of course pay for it. I just uploaded one of these images to our website and it struck me that we paid £75 for the design!

Without being to intrusive in the design, a .png file, what would be the best way to protect the image? I'm not getting paranoid about this coz I know someone, will download and use it, BUT, I do feel I need to at least do something.

Any suggestions - I don't mind paying for a software utility to do this if it provides benefits.

Cheers
John

[DS Designs]

as in a watermark generator John?, I use Easy watermark studio lite by refero. free, comprehensive and does the job

[ArferMo]

Looks like you spend a fortune on graphics for your shirts.

[ArtyGamer]

Hi John

I used to use Digimarc (http://www.digimarc.com/discover/pricing) for all my self-designed images so that anyone who did lift them and use them themselves could be easily traced by the Digimarc tracking system. It lets you know when someone uploads one of your images. They can be resized, cropped, altered in many ways.. but the watermark (invisible to the eye) is retained throughout the processing so that it is STILL your protected image. Even if someone were to open the image up in Photoshop, it would automatically detect that it has a Digimarc code embedded and they'd be asked to identify themselves before the image is opened.

I stopped using it because, even though all of my images were ending up on eBay by lazy people who neither wanted to design their own stuff or even wanted to take their own merchandise photos, any time I reported them to eBay and showed them that they were MY images of MY designs... eBay didn't care. If the images had been ending up on regular websites, I'd have kept using Digimarc but as they were only ever being stolen for eBay and subsequently ignored by their VeRO people, I stopped using it. I can definitely recommend it though.

Now, all I do is make sure the images are good enough quality to sell the products but not large enough for anyone to be able to reuse them for their own products. Since starting to use smaller images, I haven't found anyone else using my designs.

M

[GoonerGary]

ArtyGamer, people will still use tiny 72 ppi images to print, you are not dealing with professionals after all. There is a method which slices the image up into pieces, so that you can't save it properly....but that doesn't stop a screen grab. The major image libraries put a watermark across the entire image. Ask your designers to place your company logo across the image, that's the only way to do it...vandalise it!

[Stitch Up]

Thanks for the replies, some interesting stuff.

Digimarc looks a complete solution but quite pricey and based on Artygamer's experience with Ebay, probably a solution I won't be trying.

Someone sent me a link to Mass Watermark, so I'll give that a try.

Cheers

John

[pisquee]

These people are lazy, as has been said, so make it too hard for most of them to bother trying - so make is a low res, small jpg - good enough to see on screen, but rubbish blown up for actual print work, and then have a watermark across it like on Shutterstock. Then look up and consider joining ACID.

[Skye]

If you have Photoshop you can create your watermark as a "brush shape", then set up an action to add it & any EXIF data to your images as you are processing them. Using the action in the "Batch" function you can go back to add it to all your existing images.

[ArtyGamer]

I used to use watermarks, but got fed up with people messaging me on eBay asking "Will the 'ArtyGamer' logo be on the finished print?". You'd be surprised how moronic some people can be. It beggars belief, really.

[Stitch Up]

I used to use watermarks, but got fed up with people messaging me on eBay asking "Will the 'ArtyGamer' logo be on the finished print?". You'd be surprised how moronic some people can be. It beggars belief, really.

Now that made me smile ��