Cobaltié wrote:
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Great work on showing people how to remove watermarks, that'll just promote MOAR theft. -.-
Apologies for bumping this up, but watermarks are only effective for photos or detailed artwork, not renders. Unless you manage to slip a tiny tiny one in there, I doubt it makes diddly squat of difference.
Actually, there is a way to prevent it and make the watermark difficult to remove, from the background and the render itself. Try saving it as .jpg or .png. Usually one of those (depending on what you've done to edit the image) will decrease the quality just slightly, and enough to make re-editing super hard. Just save it as that file type before you would normally shrink the image (as most people do, when they make their renders, just to make them look nicer) and generally the imperfections won't be as visible. Then you get the added bonus of once the person tries to open your render and edit over it in paint - woops! They make a big mess of it and get raw-edged pixels all over the place. Super-ugly and difficult to edit out unless you know what you're doing and have a lot of patience, xD.
Just for fun, I'll illustrate my point. NOTE: I'm not going to use any of these personally, other than showing what I mean. All files will be deleted from my computer after I'm done.
Take for example this render by saske:
http://www.animationsource.org/balto/en ... display=30It's simple and clean, easy to edit. In fact, if I'd really wanted to steal it, I could have altered in in half a minute and it would literally look almost nothing like the original, other than having the same overall lineart. Kohaku's are at least a little harder to steal because she adds effects (like fading and blurring) which dirty up the image and make it harder to tamper with, because these edits are permanent and somewhat raw (though they don't appear to be.)
I was able to do this after about 30 seconds with it and only using the paint bucket tool in MS Paint:
Then, I trashed that image and re-opened it again. It was originally saved as a PNG file, so JPG was the safer transfer there. NOTE: Generally when I'm editing an image, I'm working with BMP files, then I save as BMP if I'm still going to work on them. If not, and I know it won't damage the quality too bad, I'll save it as JPG, though PNG is usually safer (just not safer as far as re-editing for renders go.) Watch using other file types - they may destroy the image. Always save a BMP copy of the image first before trying to save in a new format, just in case you mess up. Then you won't waste your hard work.
So, I changed the file type from PNG to JPG.
Here's the result:
A little rough, but not bad. Usually GOOD renders will look about like this when saved as JPG files.
And here's what happens when some unsuspecting art thief goes to steal your render.
Oops! Total mess. Usually, after seeing how hard it's going to be to clean all that up the way they want it, they'll just stop right there and trash it - not bothering to take it any further. And if they do go to the trouble of trying to fix it for hours upon hours (you have to re-construct it pixel by pixel usually, XD) then they're invariably just going to mess it up, and have to re-draw and change lines anyway.
Last but not least, here's the fixed JPG image re-sized.
NOTE: It doesn't look like it's a different size, because photobucket automatically shrank the others T.T. Optional, of course.
And there you have it, how to prevent art theft with or without a watermark (though I'd still recommend adding the watermark. Always frustrates people when combined with this method.) Pretty easy, and it's generally not going to ruin the quality of your images, so long as you're careful about selecting the images you want to render in the first place.
