Watermarks and Which Image Editor should I use?

[Mike Sibley]

My friend and fellow artists Julian Court is setting aside a year or two to see if he can make it as a professional artist. He just emailed to ask: "Are u able to advise on getting a digital watermark to protect copyright of my drawings online?"

If you're just setting up your business, going into print, or for whatever reason you need to manipulate images... you might find this useful.

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Sooner or later you're going to need a decent image editor. I use Affinity Photo 2 - one-off fee of about £60. It's on a par with Photoshop, which will cost an arm and a leg in subscription charges. Once you have Affinity, you get free upgrades, and you can install it on all your computers.

Otherwise, Corel's PaintShop Pro is a good choice, or GIMP, which is free but very quirky to use.
Editors to purchase:
https://www.techradar.com/best/photoshop-alternatives
and free editors:
https://uk.pcmag.com/photo-editing/1455 ... s-for-2023

Once you have it, you'll be able to easily do many things:
Lighten dark photos to reveal the detail
Add watermarks
Fine-tune scans prior to printing
Convert photos to line - for guidelines
Compose multi-source drawings (invaluable!)
Design and produce fliers and marketing material
And a whole lot more.

For a watermark, you simply design one (which might just be plain text), reduce its opacity to maybe 10%, layer it on top of the image you're about to use, save as a combined image, and then post to your site - or wherever. It's not totally foolproof - someone with time to kill could clone the watermark out, bit by bit.

If you're built your own website, or have access to the HTML code, add this to each <img> tag: onContextMenu="return false". Like this:
<img src="153--groenendael.jpg" alt="'Groenendael' Belgian Shepherd graphite pencil drawing by Mike Sibley" class="pic" onContextMenu="return false">

Now, anyone right-clicking the image to copy it… can't. It disables the right-click menu on that image (not the entire page). It won't stop screenshots, but they'll be 72ppi - you really need at least 300ppi resolution for good printing.

On that subject: DO NOT post high resolution images. 72ppi is screen resolution. You gain nothing by using anything higher, BUT if someone copies your image, and it's, say, 300 ppi… it's ripe for commercial printing.

Here endeth today's lesson