From the course: Photoshop One-on-One: Fundamentals

Assigning copyright and contact info - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop One-on-One: Fundamentals

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Assigning copyright and contact info

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- [Instructor] All right now we're going to start with a process that you might not necessarily think would be a first step when creating web graphics. But it actually is. And that's to identify your photograph or other artwork, with copyright and contact info. Now, it's not necessarily to protect yourself, after all copyright provides precarious protection, but rather to identify yourself. And that way, if somebody sees your artwork, and they like it, they have a way of contacting you. And so here I am looking at an image of a Peacock Mantis Shrimp, that I captured, obviously underwater, in a place called Lembeh Strait. And that very colorful stuff behind him, is actually an old tire. And that's pretty much how I was able to capture this guy is because if he wanted to run away, he's amazingly fast. But he would just run around the tire, and eventually come back to where I was. All right now, even so very proud of this photograph, and so I want to identify myself as a photographer. And I can do that by going to the File menu and choosing the File Info command. Which is going to bring up this big and extensive dialog box right here. Now, we're only interested in the basic options. So if you're not seeing him, go ahead and click on the word Basic in this left hand list, and then notice that I'm already identified as the author. And that's because I entered that information into my digital camera. And so if your camera affords you such options, definitely take advantage of them. Because that way, every image that comes out of that camera, is going to be identified as yours. All right now drop down to this item copyright status, and I'll change it to Copyrighted, although you could go with public domain if you prefer. But I'm going to mark mine as copyrighted, and then I'll click in this Copyright notice field, and press Ctrl + V, or Command + V on the Mac, and paste in some text I've created in advance. Now, you may wonder how to create this copyright symbol. On a Mac, it's a simple matter of pressing Option G. And that is G as in golf, by the way. On a PC, you need a numerical keypad, in which case, you can press and hold the Alt key, and then type sequentially 0169, and then release the Alt key. And once again, you'll get a copyright symbol. All right, I'm going to get rid of those extra copyrights, and then I'll drop down to the URL field, and I'll enter Deke.com, which is my website. If you want to test that out, then you can just click on that little arrow icon to the right of the field, which will open the site in your default browser. Now I'm not going to fill out any of the other fields, and that's because I want to save what I've done so far as a template. And so as you can see here, everything that I've entered would apply to any image I capture or any artwork I create. Whereas things like keywords, description and document title, are going to vary from one image to the next. Next, what you want to do is drop down to this item right here, that reads Template F, which is template folder, by the way, and then choose Export. And go ahead and give your template a better file name than peacock mantis shrimp. In fact, I decided to call mine Deke Type and Graphics.com, after my little Corporation. And then I'll just go ahead and replace that existing file. And now if you click on that pop up menu again, which currently reads Export, you'll see that item in the list. All right, I'm going to go ahead and click OK to accept those changes, but before I do, I want you to notice this item right here creation date. Notice that it reads December 6th of the year 2015. So the sixth of December, that's going to become important in a moment. All right, I'll go ahead and click OK. And then I'll go ahead and switch over to this guy right here. He's a Male Ribbon Eel, also captured in Lembeh Strait. I want to go ahead and assign that same copyright and contact info. So I'll go up to the file menu. And once again, choose the File Info command. There's my author name once again, but notice the creation date, this time around, it's December 11th. So not December 6th, but rather December 11th. I want you to notice that, because watch what happens, if I go ahead and choose Deke Type and Graphics. I'm going to get this alert message right here asking me if I want to clear all the existing properties, and replace them with the template properties, basically, that's always a bad idea. Because you can wipe out metadata that's part of this file. But notice, even if I say keep original metadata, but replace matching properties from the template, which should only include the stuff I entered, however, if I click OK, I want you to notice that creation date 12, 11, as soon as I click OK, it switches to 12, 6, just like the Mantis Shrimp. Now, I don't want that and there's really no way to reinstate the original creation date from inside this dialog box. So what I have to do is cancel out, and then return to the File menu, and choose File Info once again. Go ahead and choose your template, but this time respond with this final option, Keep original metadata but append, as opposed to replace matching properties from the template. And notice as soon as I click OK, I bring in the copyright status, the copyright notice and the URL, but I leave that creation date unharmed. At which point, I'll go ahead and click OK in order to update this file. All right, that's how you assign copyright and contact info, using the File Info command here inside Photoshop. In the next movie, I'll show you how to modify multiple images at a time, inside Adobe Bridge.

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