Shards

Someone sent me a question! A chance to be useful! Yay!

... I gotta start sleeping again.

Indeed I have. When you put your work on the web, it is impossible to prevent your viewers from downloading it, and possibly doing things with it that you do not wish. As an artist, you hold all the rights to your own work, and it is a very good idea to do what you can to make sure that work can be identified as yours.

A watermark actually imbeds a special code into your work. It does this by slightly altering the shade and tone of certain pixels. If you look very closely, you can find evidence of a watermark, but it is generally invisible, existing within your image. Should this work be used elsewhere, it will retain the watermarking, and will be definitively identifiable as your property. Watermarks have advanced to the point that they will endure through image blurring, cropping or tampering, and they will even show up if someone tries to print and then re-scan your picture. Pretty much the only way to get rid of a watermark is to delete every pixel.

In order to accomplish this watermarking, you need to register your name and information with a watermarking service. I recommend Digimarc.com. They offer a completely free registration for amateur artists, and also have some more advanced features, such as a web spider that will search web pages for potentially stolen images (though such services do cost money). After you register, all you have to do is download a plugin for your graphics software. I know this plugin works with Photoshop, but I'm not positive what other applications are supported. When you run the plugin, it will imbed your code and a copyright year into the image, making it just about as secure as a web graphic can possibly be.

Further, for the historically inclined, a watermark was originally invented at one of the Fabriano Mills in Tuscany during the second half of the 13th century. Originally, the watermark was implemented to give products a branded trademark of superior quality. There exists a remarkable archive of Fabriano watermarks going back to the first one in 1276, showing a mark for each year until modern times. Watermarks were first used in Italy in 1282, consisting of simple crosses and circles. They were being used in England by 1495.

Whoah. Fanart got all educational for a minute there.

So concludes another 100% Squaresoft-inspired column. Nicely done. I hope your Okage Contest entries are coming along well, and I can already tell that it's going to be another round of tough judging.

The sky is all dark tonight, swept like teardrops through the clouds...