Watermarks & Art Theft

Sunday, January 4th, 2009 | Filed under Articles, Lessons

This post deals with watermarking your work to be displayed on the Internet. It shows you how to create a watermark brush that you can use as a signature watermark each time you want to post one of your images.

Before we start, I have to say a few things and I want you to keep in mind that all I’m doing here is to speak from personal experience and my understanding of the legal issues. I’m no lawyer though and I cannot say with 100% certainty that I am understanding it right – but I do think I have a decent grasp of these matters, so listen to me and think about it or leave it. It’s up to you what you do with this info – I just don’t want any arguments about this, as this tutorial is not about the legal issues, but on the Photoshop side of things.

A watermark cannot stop art theft. The only thing that can is for you not to upload your pics anywhere online. But really, is that an option? I think it may be one if you have something you absolutely don’t want circulated anywhere for whatever reasons and on top of that you do not want to show it to anyone in a public fashion online. Your work is protected under copyright law no matter if you upload it to dA or if you don’t. No one is allowed to just take it, watermark or no watermark. More info on the legal issues can be found in this blog entry.

So, what good is a watermark anyway?

Well, if life were fair and people were just, then everyone would just accept the fact that taking things that don’t belong to you is called stealing, no matter if that theft takes place “in real life” or online. But sadly, there is a certain finders-keepers-mentality going on in the internet world that sometimes defies all logic. For instance, I’ve heard that in some forums even those who run them have no clue about artist rights. They may know that they can’t just take anything, but they don’t seem to know that they need permission to use anything that is not theirs (or offered as stock) – therefore “advice” such as “as long as it’s not watermarked you can use it” or “if there is no explicit (c) by so-and-so under the pic you are free to take it” or even “as long as you manipulate it, it’s alright because then you’re making it yours” is circulating. So in cases like these, having your name and your web adress on the pic somewhere where it cannot be easily cut off or removed without destroying the image a watermark can actually help show “this is mine, keep your fingers off of it”.

A watermark can also help give credit to you in cases where an image is just passed along to “show some friends”. I know, they are not allowed to pass your image around to anyone and they can just as well link to your deviation, but the truth of the matter is that stuff like this happens – and mostly it is rather innocent, too. Some people (especially young ones) just don’t know better. A watermark may show them that it’s not so innocent – maybe help educate them, too (I know, always the optimist here).

A watermark also helps in cases where your art is uploaded somewhere to be used as cell phone walls, myspace layouts or (awful) prints (I say awful cos you should NEVER upload a high resolution – low resolutions are pretty much worthless for printing) that unsuspecting people will actually pay money for. If it has your watermark in the middle of the pic, it is hardly fit to be sold by someone else…

These are just a few of my thoughts on the matter, but they sum up why I started watermarking my work.

How do you watermark your pics?

On deviantArt you’ve got the option to upload your high resolution file and choose to display it smaller for display as deviation – in this case you can check the field that says “Add Watermark to Full View” and dA will slap its big watermark with your dA adress on top of it. I never do this (only for the prints because there I have no other choice) for two reasons: for one, I think that is one ugly big thing that will make looking at the full view a rather unpleasant experience, and for two, I have the bad habit of forgetting to uncheck the field that lets people download the original file… On top of that, I like to optimize my deviation files before I upload them (mostly sharpening and adding the watermark).

Three stages of the watermark:
1) plain type 2) opacity of the
second type layer reduced to
50% 3) Added butterflies at
very low opacities below the
type layers.

To make things easier to use, I have created a brush that I can apply to my deviation image file before uploading. For this, open a new document in Photoshop – make it 200px wide and 200px high (or bigger if you wish – depends on how big your watermark is supposed to be in the end) with a white background and a resolution of 72 pixels/inch. Grab your Type Tool set to black color. Type your name and your dA adress (and/or your website or whatever else you want to have in the watermark) seperately so you can arrange them neatly and make changes to the font and the opacity easily.

If you look at my example to the left, you can see that there is no color in this, only different shades of grey (achived by lowering the opacities of indivudual layers). This is because a brush doesn’t have color in it later, the color comes from the color you choose through the color picker. When defining a brush you can however play with the opacity of its parts: the lighter the grey the more transparent the part will be. White is completely transparent, that is why it is our background color for this. You can add whatever you like to make it more interesting (and harder to remove) – just keep in mind that it should stay rather small so it will not overpower your image.

To define the brush all you need to do now is go to Edit > Define Brush. It will show up in your brushes as the last brush in the current set. To locate and use the brush you just need to click on the Brush Tool and find your brush in the drop down in the Options Bar.

To apply the watermark to your image, you create a new layer in the document you want to use it on, set your foreground color to the one you want to use and click on that new layer once with your new watermark brush. You can then position the watermark using the Move Tool and maybe lower its opacity a bit to make it less obtrusive. Just keep it readable and at a place where it cannot be easily cropped off or otherwise removed and you’re good to save and upload :)

Tip:

You may want to save your brush so you don’t have to worry about losing it (for example if Photoshop crashes it will loose all brushes that have not been saved!). For this go to Edit > Preset Manager and choose Brushes from the drop down menu (if it’s not already set to that). Locate your watermark brush and click on its thumbnail. Then go to Save Set – give it a nice name and save it somewhere you will find it again easily. To load that brush again you can also use the Preset Manager (just click on Load) or use the little arrow in the brush drop down menu.

More information on creating, saving and using brushes can be found in this four-part tutorial called the “Complete Photoshop Brush Guide” by nokari.deviantart.com.

Tags: brush, copyright, deviantArt, digital darkroom, photoshop, text, tutorial, watermark

5 Comments to Watermarks & Art Theft