A quick post prompted by an article in Layers magazine online.  While I agree with the spirit of the article, and applaud the use of a high-profile site to remind artists and photographers to take steps to protect their work from copyright theft, I think some of the suggested protections are counterproductive, as even the article sort of admits in places.

Take  image sizes displayed online as an example.  Average screen sizes and display resolutions are getting bigger, and an 800 x 600 picture is no longer going to fill many viewer’s displays.  While sites like Flickr will upscale a small image in the slideshow function, that upsizing is going to introduce some loss of quality.  Do you want to show your work off in a way that will likely decrease the perceived quality?

Speaking of which, over-compressing the JPEG file as an anti-theft mesaure?  Call me an old cynic if you like, but have you been to retailers like Next in the UK and had a close look at the images they sell ready-framed up as ready-to-hang artwork?  OK, they may only be £30 or so, but all the same, there’s some pretty nasty JPEG and/or upscaling artifacting going on in all of the ones I’ve seen.

So, keeping a small image size and adding JPEG compression artifacts isn’t going to put people off, not if they’ye already paying £30 for a badly-printed, poor-quality image in a wooden frame made in some cheap third-world factory.  Sad though it is, is you want some protection from abuse of your images that you put online, I think branding is the only way to add a modicum of security.

Years ago, I started branding with a small, discreet footer added to my pictures.  This started off as plain white text, in a rather nasty font, and later got slightly neater with a sans-serif font in white on a trasparent black bar, so it blended in the bottom of the image slightly more.  However, seeing examples where footers had just been cropped out by the abusers, I decided it was time to do something more difficult to erase.

I now have a Photoshop action that adds a white text footer on a 50% opaque black bar, and another that adds large 10% opaque white text right across the middle of an image.  It’s not often that an image is useful without the middle, so it’s pretty crop-proof.  This lets me still save at up to 1024 pixels, and fairly good quality levels; I tend to use Photoshop quality level 10 or the Lightroom equivalent for the web.  I’ve automated these using a droplet so I can invoke as a post-export action from Lightroom, which hopefully I’ll expand on a bit a future post. Ideally I’d like to set it up using ActionScript, so it can look at the metadata and stamp the right year on the file itself, and accomodate wildly differing image sizes automatically; another future post topic, should I ever get that working!

See some examples of this branding approach on my Flickr Photostream.  I don’t think it’s terribly intrusive, nor do I think it spoils the picture too badly.  I’d be interested to see any comments from other photographers and digital artists.