Registering your copyright with the United States Copyright Office is probably the most important thing to do to protect your creative work, but there are other ways you can use to deter image theft.

One of the most important of these "ways" to deter image theft is to set the resolution of your images to 72 dpi. This is adequate for viewing on a computer screen, but if someone was to download and try to print one of these images, they would be very disappointed. Try printing out a 72 dpi image and see for yourself that the quality is poor and the image would probably be pretty small.

To set the resolution of an image to 72 dpi, first open up your image in Photoshop and goto the "Image" menu and scroll down and select "Image Size."



Go down to where the black arrow is in the screen shot below, the resolution field, and enter 72 and then click "OK."



Another way is to use watermarks, both visible and invisible. A visible watermark is a layer of text or a logo on your image, either opaque or semi transparent, but visible to anyone and something that would obviously deter someone from stealing your images. Invisible watermarks are invisible to the human eye, but they are visible to some image editors with or without plug ins and also allow your images to be tracked on the Internet.