: Mask electrical schematic diagram I have a schematic diagram that I would like to show as a process illustration, but would like to hide its details and protect from copying. Any ideas how

@Becky351

If you have the circuit editor source file, edit the circuit to non-working by adding and removing parts and wires. This must be done in theoretically acceptable way. You must not cause obvious impossiblities such as having a resistor with texts that belong to a capacitor or a Integrated circuit or having signal path breakages and short circuits.

If you have only the graphic file, change the numeric values of the components. Retain the units and integrated circuit letter prefixes. You must know the proper conventions and standard values. Multiplying with ten or 0,1 is safe because you do not get out of the standard value series. Beware stepping out from engineering three decade windows without changing the letter too.

examples:

100k => 10k or 1k or 1M, not 1000k, not 0,1k

47k => 470k or 4,7k, not 4700k, not 0,47k

LM1234 => LM5678, not LM123, not LM56789

You can swap the values of 2 components which are of same category, for example capacitors.

Do not at all show some innovative parts of the circuits, show only something usual as your example.

Show another schematic. Do not show it totally, leave out inputs, outputs and controls.

Make a collage work that has several different unrelated circuit snippets with fading limits and different colors. Of course it's nonsense, but it may be enough, An example:

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@Vandalay110

One option would be to partially blur the image. Photoshop's smart filters are ideal for that.


Open your image in Photoshop and turn it into an actual layer (rather than the background) by double-clicking the layer bar in the Layers palette;
Right-click the layer miniature and choose Convert to Smart Object;
Choose Filter > Gaussian Blur and choose a value that completely hides all detail in the picture;
Click on the filter's layer mask and fill it with black to make it invisible everywhere;
Use a big, soft white brush on the filter's layer mask to paint the filter visible in selected places.

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