spoiling good pics with copyright stamps

[crisscross]

I find it really annoying that copyright notes on images actually spoil the image.

Apart from anything else, they are often in an area where it can be cloned out in a few seconds, so is entirely ineffectual.

You might care to try an alternative I worked out for people pics. I keep a little rubber stamp
http://img100.imageshack.us/img100/1452/dontcopy1ip.jpg
which can be scaled to suit a patch of image difficult to clone out and colour 'just visible' as I have done very quickly on quackers (which I think is thus spoilt to no good purpose) at
http://img81.imageshack.us/img81/9748/quackers9pn.jpg

If you put stuff on the internet you are putting it into the public domain & difficult to have it both ways.

PS to use the stamp, magic wand select all the white, including centre of letters>invert selection>copy and paste. It is often easier to resize and recolour in a seperate file before rubber stamping the real thing; also sometimes increase selection 1 pixel to make heavier.

[StuartDH]

You're right, a few minutes in Photoshop will get rid of almost any copyright text and you'll never stop anyone who's really intent on nicking an image. However, copyrights are a useful reminder to everyone else that you own the image and don't want it copied without permission. There are also plenty of people who won't even know how to remove a copyright and so they'll just go off and find another pic that doesn't have a watermark instead.

Something small, discreet and semi-transparent would be great, but when the pictures are as good as the quackers image then I hardly notice the copyright text anyway

[digi]

An external copyright stamp reminds those that do not know that an image is copyright, even when it has an internal watermark which is more difficult to remove. From personal experience with copyright protection and images being stolen I do internal and external marking on protected images because someone can always claim they were unaware an image was copyright.

Its a sign of the times.

[Fourwings]

There's never any safeguards regarding your images being pirated when posted on the internet.

I use both watermarks & copyright text if sending out a full size file images either via e-mail or for print use, but I don't see the need when posting to websites, gallerys etc... as the low res scaled down versions needed on these sites render the image virtually usesless for comercial purposes.

As Stu quite correctly points out, if the image quality is good you just dont notice the copyright mark anyway, its a real shame as photographers we have to think this way about others, but as Digi quite rightly states its a sign of the times.