Page 333 - Enhancing CAD Drawings with Photoshop

4386.book Page 317 Monday, November 15, 2004 3:27 PM

PROTECTING YOUR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY 317

Protecting Your Intellectual Property
You can employ several strategies to protect your intellectual property. The first is embedding
descriptive metadata that identifies the copyright holder. Metadata has the tangential benefit of pro-
viding a means to search for visual data with keywords—essential if your firm has thousands of dig-
ital photographic assets, for example. Metadata also encodes many useful details about an image such
as when and where the shot was taken, with what camera, and how (specific camera settings).
Watermarks, both visible and hidden, can be used at the next level of protection. A visible water-
mark is a copyright symbol or a company logo that is faintly superimposed over an image, ensuring
that the viewer is aware of its intellectual provenance. The downside to using a visual watermark
is that it competes with the visual imagery itself and can distract from the image’s worth as a commu-
nication tool. Hidden watermarks (also called digital copyright) are essentially imperceptible to the
human eye; encrypted code is added as digital noise to the image. Hidden watermarks may positively
identify a digital image as belonging to a specific copyright holder, but do not appear when printed.
The highest level of security is password protecting your imagery with PDF technology. You can
also restrict access so that an image can be viewed and printed but not copied or altered, for example.
After reviewing the options, the choice of how to protect your intellectual property (or to rely on
trust) is your own strategic decision.

Adding Metadata
Metadata is information about image data; it describes and categorizes visual imagery with text, mak-
ing it easily searchable. Librarians and professional photographers like metadata because it allows
them to find the veritable needle in a digital haystack. Be aware that metadata is only useful if some-
one takes the time to embed meaningful information in metadata tags.
You might like metadata for the ability to embed your copyright and URL in image files so that
unknown admirers of your imagery can find you on the Web. In addition, many types of metadata
store useful factual information about the shooting settings, Camera Raw adjustments, and even GPS
coordinates (if the camera was so equipped). Let’s take a look at an image that already has metadata
stored so that you can learn how to add metadata to your own images.

NOTE Only the following file formats support metadata both on Windows and the Mac OS: PSD,
PSB, TIFF, JPEG, EPS, and PDF.

1. Open the File Browser (press Shift+Ctrl+O).
2. Using the controls in the File Browser, navigate to the Chapter 9 folder on the companion CD.
3. Select LookingEast.tif and examine the Metadata palette within the File Browser (see
Figure 9.27).

4. The File Properties category shows basic facts about the image, such as its pixel size, file size,
color depth, and color profile. Expand the IPTC (International Press Telecommunications
Council) category.