The Big “c”
The digital age has brought many advantages, and also a few disadvantages. The ability to reproduce complex data effortlessly, and to transfer it over great distances has been both a benefit and problem. The most notable example of this could arguably, be Shawn Fanning, who turned the music industry on it’s head with his file sharing program, “Napster”. Trying to maintain control of the distribution of music has been a long battle for the music industry.
Photography in the digital age shares some of the same problems, and a simple way to reduce image theft on the web(or at least make the ownership obvious) is via some type of copyright notice. Copyright information can also be embedded in the image data, but it is easy to strip the information off.
An alternative discussed here is to place your name directly on the image, but to do so in such a way as to not be too distracting to the viewer. The method I use is fairly simple to do in Photoshop.
First , open your image in Photoshop and resize it to it’s final output dimensions, I usually resize to 640 pixels on the long size. Next, click on the “text” icon on the tool box, this will create a text layer on top of your image.
To get the “©” symbol, press “alt - G” on Mac, or “alt 0169” on PC. Now, select the font type and size if you wish(you can leave it until later), and enter your name. Do note that if the font size is very large or small, it may be difficult to see what you are typing(18-30 pt is good for starters).
Once you are done, you can highlight the text, reposition or alter the font type or size to your liking.
Make sure the text layer is selected in the layers palette, and select the funny “ f “ symbol in the black dot at the bottom of the layers palette. This will open a popup menu, select “bevel and emboss”. This will open a dialogue box. At the top, in the “bevel and emboss” area, adjust the sliders to get the effect you prefer(I use soften around 3 and size 7 , depending on font size).
Once you have the effect the way you like, select “OK” to close the dialogue box.
Next, I adjust the opacity of the text layer so that it is not too distracting. In this example, I have set it to 31%. Now, if you are happy with the result, you can flatten the image, save and post your image. The final product is at the start of this article.
A couple of points to consider. Avoid placing the layer on an area of even tone(such as a bird against a clear blue sky), as it is a simple matter to clone it out in Photoshop. In those cases, I will try to overlap some of the copyright notice with a part of the subject.
Placing your name and copyright directly on the image has a side benefit as well. Publishers will often use jpgs from websites in layouts. If your name is visible, it makes it easy to identify you if they decide to contact you about using your image!
