How to create a © sign on your photos or documents
Those of you who are thinking of publishing anything, might find
this information useful. I think it's true that whoever creates and
publishes something original, will own the copyright for it for the
next 70 years. So you shouldn't download off the internet another
person's photographs and publish them in your own work,
without his/her permission and paying any relevant fee.
With Photoshop however, you could erase the © symbol and the
photographer's name off a photo, to use it purely for your own personal
use, but obviously not for commercial use or to republish it on the
internet. I know of one blogger who used lots of photos of South
Africa from a South African Tourist Board site, and who was asked to
remove the photos from his blog by the tourist board officials. You
would think they could have come to some compromise, as the
tourist board was getting some free advertising.
Anyway, to get back to creating a © symbol ... you have to
use the numeric keyboard, which is the numbers section on
the right hand side of your keyboard, not the numbers running
along the top of it. So simply press down the Alt key (next to
the space bar) and type in the numbers 0169. Take your
hands off the keyboard and the © sign will pop up. You can
alter the size of it, in the same way you alter the size of text
.... e.g. ©.
In my last Photoshop class, I got stuck with showing this
on the laptop. I looked it up later on Google (what an
amazing search facility!), and found the answer. If you have
a close look roughly in the middle of your laptop keyboard,
you will see numbers 0 to 9 coloured a medium blue.
These are the numbers for the numeric keyboard.
To access them, you have to press down the Function (Fn)
key which is next to the Control key.
So to create the © sign with a laptop keyboard, press down
the Fn and Alt keys together, and type in the blue numbers
0169.
If you're wondering how to create other unusual
characters, Microsoft Windows has a large stack of them
in the section known as the "Character Map"... odd things
such as triangular arrows, playing card symbols (eg the heart
shape), and the male and female signs.
I found these in Windows XP, by clicking on "Start" and
then "Help and Support", and then by typing in the words,
"character map" into the search facility, and then
following the instructions. When you've found the map
section, you can then copy and paste one onto a document
or a photo.
In my last Photoshop session (on Thursday 19 November),
I will show the group how to correct red eye, how to create
borders around photos, and how to do a few things with
"layers", such as creating photo-montages.
I will run another set of four Photoshop classes in January to
February, in a new time slot (provisionally on Tuesday afternoons, in
Week One, to start after Ray Gosling's group meetings). I will email
everyone on the Nottm U3A email list nearer the time, to advertise the
sessions (and I'll give preference to those of you who couldn't attend
my present series of talks). Ken tells me that the first Week One
Tuesday will be 9 January 07, by the way.
J.H.
