I assume most of you guys use the process of accepting partial deposit before starting work and the rest is to be paid after delivering the final version, and same as me you send your client a preview of the final version and await for payment before sending the high resolution version. I'm wondering how to avoid being ripped off if a client vanishes after receiving the preview. How big is your 'low res' version? Do you use any other precaution when working with new clients?
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Well, if somebody is using your art without your permission or worse without paying you, you just sue him? The law is totally on your side in this case. And nobody sane would steal preview and start using it like nothing happened.
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try taking half up front from less known clients.. it's okay to wait till they get the best picture for bigger companies that have reputations to maintain.
This is for next time obviously, i definately recommend putting a watermark that says like "Finished Product" on the image in a PSD. Then once the client pays you send the hi res
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I add a bar to the bottom of the image, with the name of the project, my name, and something along "low quality file for approval purposes. Not for print". It's similar to the footer you see a some of the concept art plates around the web, I just don't overlay it on the image.
Usually, dropping the file from 300 to 72 DPI is enough to keeping it from being printed with quality. If that is not small enough, I go for a 1400 pixels on the maximum width. You can see lots of details, but not big prints from it.
Back on the studio I worked on, we used to do something similar, but they added white borders around the image too, to standardize the low-res file send to clients. They are always screen-friendly.
I never had problems, but the studio had some. Not about people not paying, but about people printing the low quality images. It happened more than once while I was working there, so the obvious NOT FOR PRINT message kind of helped drive that away.
