NOTE: I am sorry this post is so late today! You’ll see why below.
Hello friends! Thank you so much for the comments! ♥ I feel the love and I love it! ♥
The party is still going strong! I have five more winners from yesterday’s (2/29) comments drawing: Marian S, Jodi, Annette L, Sally, and Eunice C. Pick any collage sheet or digi stamp set from my shop: www.SwingShiftDesigns.com and I will be more than happy to email your prize to you!
We are having drawing tomorrow with five more winners! Random.org will draw 5 more names from all comments dated today, 3/1/12 for tomorrow’s drawing. Pick up your Birthday Party Favor Freebies below and leave a birthday wish, a thank you, or some love and you will be entered into a drawing to win a Swing Shift Designs digital collage sheet or digi stamp set of your choice.
Today I thought I would share a little bit about copyrights. Some of you might be wondering how I could possibly copyright something that someone else created over 100 years ago. Allow me to explain! Take the graphic below for example. It is a typical vintage graphic, most likely a label. As is, it falls within the public domain because it was originally published before January 1, 1923. The key words here are “as is”! Before I started writing on it and working on the revisions below, anyone could use and sell this graphic. It was royalty free and copyright free, because the copyright expired.

I really liked the design (I ♥ flowers), but I had no use for it as is. I want to give you, the people that use my collage sheets, the very best quality graphics possible! Swing Shift Designs is known for our high quality images! (Yep, I am very proud of that!) I want you to have the option of using it in the best possible condition or distressing it yourself they way you want it to look. So, I went to work on it. I fixed all the unsightly spots and missing parts of the picture. I replaced the end of the banner that was cut off, I replaced the wheat that was cut off of the top, and I balanced out the bottom. Then I did some color correction to really make the colors pop! I know some people like vintage with white backgrounds and some like vintage with beige backgrounds, so I did both. I also thought a nice blue would look pretty, so I did that too. All the work I did on this graphic is pretty typical for a vintage image. Imagine doing all that eight more times to come up with enough graphics to make one collage sheet!
You know why I do it? Because I ♥LOVE♥ it! Click on each graphic below for the full size 300ppi version and save it to your computer.
So, the question remains, where does the new copyright come in? It comes in now! I did a lot of work on that image!!! It took a LOOOOONG time to clean it up and make it usable, so I get to copyright it as my own. The original is still in the public domain, but my version is now copyrighted and protected under United Stated Copyright law. So, please, if you use any of my images and post your art online be sure to credit SwingShiftDesigns.com. I would really appreciate it, plus it gives me the warm fuzzies!
I also want to show you the different things that you could do with a vintage image and photo/graphic design software. As with all the images I use, I cleaned it up and fixed any damage, discoloration, etc. I left the antique patina in the first version, but I removed it for the second version. I made the image black and white for the third version and sepia for the fourth. Last, but not least, I made a digital stamp for the 5th version (jpg) and sixth version (png). Creating a digital stamp from a color image is a lot more time consuming than creating one from the line drawing graphic that I converted for yesterday’s post. It can take several hours to make just one stamp, depending on the detail and how much has to be done “by hand”. This image has a lot of detail, which is the reason this post is soooo late today! I think the results are worth the time! I hope you think so as well!
Please click on each image for a high quality 300ppi full size version and then save the full size image to your computer.
I hope you enjoyed today’s post! Thank you very much for stopping by! Remember, the “earth” without “art” would just be “eh”! 

PS: At the rate I am going, I better start tomorrow’s post now! LOL