Web Class Blog

One of the questions we get most often from site owners is, “How can I protect my images from being stolen?”

Our answer is, “You can’t. And if you do it right, you don’t need to!”

We recently presented this concept to a group of museum personnel from around Wyoming and Colorado, and watched the light bulb go on in their eyes as we explained what that meant.

Methods of protecting images by blocking the right click, or cloaking the code are pretty much a waste of time. If I can see it, I can get it if I want to. There is no way you really CAN protect images from being stolen by a determined thief. That might sound distressing, unless you determine to use that reality as an advantage instead of seeing it as a disadvantage.

Instead of trying to lock them down, use them for your benefit. If they are going to take them, then let them do so with your blessing.

Apply a watermark to any of your images that may be desirable for theft. You can apply a watermark in two basic ways:

1. A high contrast URL placed in the bottom of the image. Typically, white text with a strong black extrusion or drop shadow will contrast with virtually anything and be readable. This is most appropriate for images that are central to a message where the center needs to be clear.

2. A low opacity watermark in the center. This is appropriate for images that are samples or examples, or for images that are of products that you do not want someone to lift. Most graphics programs allow you to do this. A logo, or a URL is appropriate here, but a URL is more viral – it brings people back to you.

Some people will “hotlink” to your images. They show your image, and you get no credit – but you pay for the server power to display them since they just link them from your server to their page. They do NOT show a link back to your website though, so you pay, but don’t get any benefit.

When you use a watermark URL on your images, you at least get some benefit and advertising from people who hotlink to your images, or otherwise steal them.

They COULD remove the watermark. But it is WORK to do so. And most people who steal images or hotlink to images are lazy – work is definitely a put-off, so they are more likely to either use it as-is, or leave it alone.

So instead of trying to lock up your images, invite people to use them – and let it work to the advantage of your business.

I learned it in less than a day – at least, I mastered the rudimentary skills to produce a fairly decent Flash header, in about 4 hours, with totally unfamiliar software, and very little experience with animation or movies. I’d made animated GIFs before, but that was about it.

No matter which program you use, Flash is going to be complicated to work with. It is necessarily more complicated than image editing, because there are more functions, and more variables. Each of those variables has to have a control, and those controls happen differently in each program. Simplified programs generally will not have the flexibility to allow you to make the animations do what you want them to do.

For the record, I experimented with Namo FreeMotion. I’m a fan of Namo WebEditor, so this seemed the logical place to start. The learning curve is still fairly high, and the manual is confusing – some tools are described, but no information is available as to what they actually mean, if you are not already familiar with their terms. The whole section on symbols is completely incomprehensible. But it is possible to learn to create a basic animation fairly quickly.

You’ll learn more quickly if you have experience with object oriented graphics (vector graphics like Illustrator), because some of the concepts are the same. You spend more time telling the computer what you want to do, than you spend actually doing things directly like you would in a bitmap graphics program like Photoshop.

FreeMotion is available in a trial download though, and is worth taking for a spin. You’ll get off the ground fairly quickly if you follow the tutorial in the back of the manual, after reviewing the tools and concepts.

We’ve had a lot of fun with image editing software. Most recently, our son played with some tie-dye, and took a picture of himself in a tie-dyed shirt and tie. We promptly loaded it into our image editing program, and put matching dye stains on his face and hands and emailed it back to him.

It was very simple to do – it took three tools to do it – one to select the spots to dye, one to change the color of them, and one to smooth the edges so they did not look choppy. Anyone could have done it, but knowing how to use the tools right, made it fast to do, and made the end result look more natural.

The real challenge in working with photos isn’t to tie-dye someone’s face. It is to create an effect that looks like it was real – and not something that was painted on or computer altered. When you get it right, it really looks like he dribbled the dye over himself along with the shirt!

You don’t learn to do this by practicing doing that exact thing, either. You learn it by learning what the tools are, and how to use them well.

Once you learn that, all kinds of possibilities are open for having fun with your family photos! You are limited only by your imagination.

So what does it all mean? Why would you want to take a class to learn this?

Tired of uploading pictures of the grandkids only to have them take forever to upload – or keep timing out so they never send? Ever put a picture on a web page to have it take an age to show up, or worse, not load at all? Cropping, scaling, and image types can solve these problems and more.

Think you’d like to put a shaped image over the top of another image so that the background showed through? How about creating a great text image for a site?  Basic image creation techniques can show you how to do that quickly.

Want to create a header for a website with a blended photo, or make a picture look extra special? Basic image creation and editing skills get the job done.

And if you think your brother really needs Klingon ridges on his forehead, or if you’d like to take your granddaughter’s finger out of her nose in that Christmas photo, intermediate retouching techniques allow you to do that, and more! Finally, you can get your ex out of that photo in such a professional way that nobody else will ever know they were there! We’ve done exactly these things (though it was someone else’s ex we removed from the photo, I’d never want to remove Kevin!).

Need to know what software you can afford, which one to do more creative things, or which tools are worth the money? Ever wanted to see how a drawing tablet works? These issues are addressed in both Image editing classes.

I’m really looking forward to teaching these classes, because images can be so much fun. Since the classes are not software specific (and free software is available if you need it), these are great classes to take if you are interested and wondering what you can accomplish with computer graphics, or if you have a need to understand how images work online.

Great images for the web are not that hard to find, or produce. You just need to know where to look, and a few simple techniques to take an image from ho-hum, to ah-ha.

Web images are often photos, sometimes clipart, frequently text, and more and more often, complex combinations of all three. If you start with part of a message, you can often pull together other items to complete the message.

Sometimes it can be hard to find just the right image with just the right message to start with. When that happens, you may need to look a little further, or pay for an image when you hoped to get one free.

If you combine a photo, with some drawing, you’ve instantly set it apart, if the two work well together. When you add text, for something like a site header, the key to making it work well is choosing text that echoes the message, combined with effects on the text that reinforce both the message and readability.

Most techniques for editing images are really quite simple. Some require a steady hand, or special tools, but the most often used techniques are things that virtually anyone can do – applying a gradient, adjusting opacity, selectively blurring, enhancing color or contrast, or subtle retouching. Using them right makes dull images pop.

These are the techniques we begin to teach in our Beginning Images class, and cover in more depth in our Intermediate Images class, both of which are scheduled for this summer (and will be scheduled again in the fall).