Sunday, October 11, 2009

A cheap, easy way to protect your work


It's been about a year since Orphan Works has been at the forefront of discussion in many circles. It seems like its only on the table of awareness if its finally come to go to battle. None the less, more and more I see images on folks websites with "(c) Artist Name" below the image. This is all fine I guess as long as a big ugly watermark isn't blinding me. I've found a more simpler solution to this problem.

I was screwing around with photoshop this morning before starting a piece for school and I found something interesting. Every scanned painting or digital painting you create has metadata, that tells you different things. It tells you the size of the file, the height and width, ect. Did you know that you could also put your contact info, copyright and a whole lot more in it?

Also, if someone pulls your image off the web, and deletes that data to claim that they made the image before you, you can show them the modification dates in the file. This then shows you in fact did make the file before they just tweeked the metadata to try and claim it as there own.

So yeah, continue putting "(c) Artist Name" on your images if you want, but this is a layer of protection that will help you in the long run and it takes 5 minutes of your time before you send a file off to a client or throw something on the web.

You can do this in any Adobe program. Just go to File > File Info and then fill in everything you need to fill out.

Make sure to keep a PDF of all your images as well. PDF's can't be changed at all and hold up in court alittle better and only add to your protection of your artwork.

4 comments:

EDWIN VAZQUEZ said...

Thanks! I always wanted to know how to do this...

=v=

Eric Braddock said...

Woah, awesome tip, man. Thanks for sharing the info.

pw! said...

wow THANKS!!!

Anonymous said...

thanks fish this was awesome

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