...although I have just thought of an idea that I am going to try, I will let you know if it works.
Well here is my idea, let me know what you think.
Have a look at what I have done to embed a watermark into the image below, although you will probably need to download the image onto your hard drive and zoom in to about 300 or 400 percent to see the full effect (or hold down ctrl and scroll with your mouse wheel to zoom when looking at the image on PC), as it is not really noticeable at normal screen viewing size, which is the whole idea, but should still be enough to deter any use of your images without your permission.
I have done this on a really colourful image, to see if it will work with any image and any colour or tone and is the reason why I picked 50% grey as the mid tone balance point colour for the embedded text within the image.
If you want to try this for yourself on one of your own images, then I have explained what I did in a step by step guide below - have fun!!
ONLY DO THIS TO A COPY OF YOUR ORIGINAL IMAGE!!!!Embedding a Copyright watermark throughout your image,1 - Create a new transparent image in Photoshop something like L=50mm x H=20mm - experiment with this to find the copyright text size that works for you and your images.
2 - Put your Copyright text into it.
3 - Set the text colour to 50% grey (R:128, G:128, B:128)
4 - Crop the image close to the text.
5 - Go to Edit and convert to pattern.
6 - Close the image and don't save.
7 - Now open the image you wish to copyright in Photoshop.
8 - Create a duplicate layer (Ctrl+j).
9 - Open your blending palette and select 'Pattern Overlay’ and choose your new Copyright pattern.
10 - Set the blend mode to soft light and 10% opacity - again experiment as to what you want to appear in your images, but 10% seems to work quite well as a staring point.
You should now have a barely noticeable copyright text embedded throughout the image, you can tweak what you can see by reducing the layer opacity if you wish.
Flatten the image and resize down to around 800/900px on the longest side and then save as a JPG with a compression ratio of no more than 10.
You can now upload your image to any site anywhere, knowing it can never be copied and successfully used without your permission
Once the pattern is created and saved, you could easily put all these steps into an action called 'Copyright' and then run it on any image you intended to upload to the net but wish to protect.
Other ideas - before you flatten the two layers, you could use a graduated mask to blend in the copyrighted layer to the background layer, to only appear in parts of the image you want it to, such as a sort of masked vignette surrounding the most interesting part of the image which you may wish to show, or perhaps only over the main item which you wish to protect, or in a band across parts of the image.
The whole idea is that you can have as much or as little embedded copyright info on your image as you see fit, yet the view of the image on screen is not noticeably affected unless it is printed or upsized and used elsewhere, then it would be fully noticeable and deter who ever is trying to use it without your permission.
Have fun and let me know what you think to the idea
Dave
