In light of Lotofoto’s justified concerns and Coyoteself’s unfortunate experience, I thought I would offer the following as some form of copyright protection. This tip comes from Scott Kelby’s Adobe Photoshop CS3 for Digital Photographers. It adds a distinctive (i.e., hard to remove) but not very obtrusive watermark, as you can see above. It is a little time-consuming at first, but can be turned into an action and, I imagine, adapted for other image-editing applications. (If you, like me, forget some vital step in the action, which leads to unpleasant error messages, save a grey picture with the watermark and copy the relevant layer into your target image.)

I'm posting the text in the forum for general use and am happy to offer what little technical experience I have if you experience problems with the tip. I would also advise victims of image theft here to post comments in the thief's friends' sites. Shame is the best (perhaps only) tool we have here.

Here's what you do in CS3 to obtain the above

1. Open image
2. Select custom shape, click on Fill Pixels icon (3rd from left); click on thumbnail to right of word “shape” and click once on copyright symbol (©)
3. Create new blank layer; select a light grey foreground colour with colour picker; click and drag to add a large copyright symbol. Once drawn, click on Add a Layer Style and choose Bevel and Emboss from the pop-up menu and click on OK
4. Hit T for the type tool. Kelby suggests writing “Copyright [year] [your name]”. It’s tempting to type “why don’t you use your own damn’ pictures, moron?” but that would be counter-productive, however satisfying. Click on OK when satisfied with your text.
5. Duplicate the Bevel and Emboss layer style and apply it to the text layer by pressing alt, clicking on the word “Effects” and dragging-and-dropping onto the Type layer.
6. Merge the type and copyright symbol layer; change the new layer’s blend mode to hard light (which makes it transparent) and set opacity to, say, 30%.

Kelby also refers Photoshop users to the File info options under the File menu to make sure the Exif data contain your name and copyright status.

Before I forget, in any type editing tool on a PC (mac users, sorry I don’t know), the © symbol can be obtained by pressing and holding the left alt key and 0169 on the number pad.

I realise that in offering this tip to victims of copyright abuse I am flagrantly breaching Kelby’s own copyright, having slavishly transcribed his steps from his work almost verbatim. Oops