An over-analyst's question about watermarking (not creating one)

[shutternut]

Ok..After searching numerous sites I've given up on finding my answer so I thought I'd present it here. And yes, I have looked at the links from sticky threads on here and other threads, but have not found a direct answer to this particular question.

I know how to make a watermark, and have made a custom brush already for the purpose. However, I feel I am either missing a very obvious point everyone else naturally gets, or I'm just reading in to it too much. .

Say your me, and you've just finished PP on a RAW photo and are happy with it.. now you want to add your watermark/copyright logo, so you make a new layer, stamp it on there and Wallah! A copyrighted image.

My question I guess is, what do you save it as? and if you want to go back to do prints/cds etc.. do you have separate non-watermarked files? I feel like I'm going to have to keep three files (a raw, a psd and a jpeg) of every image.. and that seems like a lot of extra work and space in organizational terms.

If you save it as a jpeg, it's my understanding that the watermark becomes an irreversible part of the image information and of course the file is compressed.. .any re-edit and saving of the image only compresses it further.

If you save it as a .psd or tiff, you have a much larger image, but can edit the watermark later. Now I know you can upload a tiff to flickr, but that's up to 20mb from my understanding, and a lot of images usually break that in the first few layers I do.

So do I need to save a psd for my own use, and a separate jpeg for web use? It seems like keeping two or three of every photo is a lot of extra work, and not very efficient, so there has to be a better way and I'm just missing it.

Please help out if you can.. maybe I just have a poor understanding of file types with photoshop, but hey, that's why I'm asking!

[no.absolutes]

I am by no means an expert, but I keep three copies of all the images. Raw, Jpeg w/ watermark, and Jpeg w/o watermark. Once a month or so I burn everything to DVD so I can erase it off of my computer. In my ideal world, I would a) have a newer computer and b) have a nice large external harddrive to keep everything on.

[RexK_Cozumel]

Ok first off watermarking an image does not mean that it is copyrighted. Actually as soon as you take the image it is copyrighted. The water mark just casually discourages people from stealing the image. I say casually because honestly anyone that is skilled at photoshop can remove the watermark pretty easily. That is unless you make the watermark big and distrupting to the image in which case it will detract from your image.

As far as the rest of your question yes I keep the raw file from the camera a PSD and a jpeg. I do this for all files where I do a new technique on the processing and I want to remember what I did. If it is something that I do all the time and I already have a PSD with the same technique done to a different image then I will just save the raw file and a jpeg. This is because the PSD files can get rather large. (I have some that are close to 800mb)

[shutternut]

Originally Posted by RexK_Cozumel

Ok first off watermarking an image does not mean that it is copyrighted. Actually as soon as you take the image it is copyrighted. The water mark just casually discourages people from stealing the image. I say casually because honestly anyone that is skilled at photoshop can remove the watermark pretty easily. That is unless you make the watermark big and distrupting to the image in which case it will detract from your image.

As far as the rest of your question yes I keep the raw file from the camera a PSD and a jpeg. I do this for all files where I do a new technique on the processing and I want to remember what I did. If it is something that I do all the time and I already have a PSD with the same technique done to a different image then I will just save the raw file and a jpeg. This is because the PSD files can get rather large. (I have some that are close to 800mb)

Thanks guys.

I understand that technically it's not actually copyrighted because you slap it on there.. it's all from the click of the shutter (at least to an extent if you really get technical ).. but like you said.. I'd like to "casually discourage" replication. I know photoshop people could easily remove it, but at least I'd have proof showing that it was watermarked at one time. I don't mind the raw and jpegs, but yes.. those PSD's get massive quick! Maybe I'll start moving those to my 1tb external and just keeping the raws and jpegs on my computer for the time being. I was hoping there was a more efficient way, but I suppose that's all I can do for the time being. Thanks for the feedback!

[RexK_Cozumel]

Make sure that you have more than 1 backup. Harddrives have a 100% failure rate. It is not a question of if it will fail or not but a matter of when. I keep files I am currently working on in my computer hard drive and a external backup drive. Then all the archive files go onto two seperate external drives. So basically I always have at least 2 copies of every file no matter what.

[autofocus]

I always keep the original out of camera file whether RAW, or JPEG. I have my own coding system and after I edit the original I do a "save as" and add an "f" suffix (for fixed) to the original image file number. If I feel comfortable with a particular customer they will see a proof of the fixed image without our copyright on it. However, if after doing what I call a "discovery agreement" on the client by asking some simple questions like, "do you or the people in your family shoot a lot of digitals?"...or "do you do a lot of photo editing on your computer?" If the answer is yes to some of these simple questions I will make a third proof version with our copyright on it, and those will be the proofs they'll see.