Can you shrink wrap in Adobe Photoshop?

[Beauty Through a Lens]

"shrink wrapping,” this method involves placing the image behind a transparent foreground layer. The image will appear normal online, but when a user attempts to right click and save it, the transparent file will be saved instead.

If so how do you do it in Photoshop?

[Manfred M]

Sorry, I've never heard of this being done. It sounds rather implausible.

Most image files stored on the web are jpegs, and these do not have layers, so even if you have a layer in your Photoshop file, it will be flattened and eliminated during the save to jpeg process. TIFF files can support layers, but have never seen them used on the web.

On the internet, if you can see the file, you can copy it. There is NO workaround.

[Beauty Through a Lens]

I read it on this website?

https://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tu...ine-photos.htm

[Manfred M]

In order to use these techniques you would have to custom build your own website with appropriate mechanism in place. In theory, I can see how this could be implemented, but other than the disabled right click, I've never seen the other two techniques used in practice. The overhead costs (large file size and slow load times) suggests that the shrink wrapper method would not be all that practical.

As the article says, it will prevent novices from copying your files, but even a reasonably intermediate user would have no issues at all getting them.

Now, with advances made in web technology, virtually no one other than large commercial enterprises hand-craft parts of their websites use HTML code any more. The vast majority of sites out there are powered by engines like WordPress, which don't offer this feature. Professional photographers do use portfolio sites with their clients, but password protection and low-res images are how they protect themselves. I can disable sharing on sites like Flickr, but can extract an image in seconds using my web browser.

So, while the article may be technically correct, it is a bit dated and is highly reliant on custom code (something that is not in general use), to implement these strategies.

The same argument can be made for other techniques like watermarking. Unless your image is totally obliterated by a water mark, making it somewhat useless, anyone with even rudimentary skills with Photoshop can often remove these in seconds.

Bottom line; the only way to prevent your work from being ripped off is to not put it on line. The way to minimize damage is to post low res images; but even this only has a significant impact in print, not web display.

So how is this done in Photoshop:





Dead easy; just add a new layer on top of your image. Making this work in real life is the tough part...

[Krawuntzel]

I read it on this website?

https://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tu...ine-photos.htm

But there it reads also:
With each example, just view the image's HTML source code if you want to learn how to implement any of these protection features.
To do that you have to change the HTML code which is done on the server, not in your image. So only Admins/Moderators of a web page can add restrictions to download/copying files.
I downloaded Manfreds picture, "processed" it, and upload it here - Manfred, if you disagree, let me know to delete it.



Erwin

[xpatUSA]

I read it on this website?

https://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tu...ine-photos.htm

As has been already stated, it's trivial to access the code. This is from the examples in the tutorial:

<div style="width: 240px; height: 150px;">
<img src="http://cdn.cambridgeincolour.com/images/tutorials/protect_topleft1.jpg" alt=""
 width="120" height="75">
<img src="http://cdn.cambridgeincolour.com/images/tutorials/protect_topright1.jpg" alt=""
 width="120" height="75"><br/>
<img src="http://cdn.cambridgeincolour.com/images/tutorials/protect_bottomleft1.jpg" alt=""
 width="120" height="75">
<img src="http://cdn.cambridgeincolour.com/images/tutorials/protect_bottomright1.jpg" alt=""
width="120" height="75">
</div>

You see the URLs for four images but the HTML only shows two because one is placed on top of another. The 'div' specifies an area on the page, in this case not fixed to an xy location - just a fixed size box. Within each 'img', the image on-screen widths and heights are specified as exactly half the size of the 'div'. The 'br' (new-line) makes sure that the following two images over-write the first two.

In FireFox, I found this code within seconds by right-clicking on the page background area and selecting 'View Source'.

Copy the third image's URL into your browser nav bar and voila:




There are HTML protection codings possible, I'm sure - some sites I've been to will put up a warning when you right-click an image, or just plain do nothing. Some fancy embedded code such as JavaScript might do it.

All of which is useless to the OP if he is not a Webmaster . . .

P.S. I plead guilty to only reading the title line initially, and was going to post this



Pretty, ain't it?

[Mike Buckley]

Keep in mind that the CiC piece also says that using a "print screen" or making a screen capture will copy the images. I used the latter method to copy the so-called protected images shown below. That method took about 10 seconds using the Snipping Tool software that came with my operating system.

[xpatUSA]

There are HTML protection coding protections available, I'm sure - some sites I've put up a warning when you right-click an image, or just plain do nothing. Some fancy code such as JavaScript might do it.

A quick look at a Flickr page reveals:

<img width="971" height="647" src="//c2.staticflickr.com/6/5586/15110520872_c08a0e0a2f_n.jpg"
 class="low-res-photo">
<img width="971" height="647" src="//c2.staticflickr.com/6/5586/15110520872_c08a0e0a2f_b.jpg"
class="main-photo is-hidden" onload="registerFirstPhoto(this)">
<noscript> <img width="971" height="647" src="//c2.staticflickr.com/6/5586/15110520872_c08a0e0a2f_b.jpg"
 class="main-photo"> </noscript>

As I suspected, JavaScript is involved. The attribute: onload="registerFirstPhoto(this)" is a JavaScript statement.

Interestingly, 'noscript' which is there in case your Browser has JavaScript disabled, does appear to show the image without protection and, if you disable JavaScript in your Browser, right-clicking might work!

(pasting the URL shown above won't work because the front bit - http://etc/etc/ - is missing).