How the protection overlays work

This page describes the exact mechanism, because protection claims without a mechanism are marketing.

What is drawn on your image

Both overlay options tile the whole frame with the same 4×4 pixel checkerboard: two cells tinted blue, two tinted pink, alternating every 2 pixels. The standard high-frequency overlay draws it at about 3% opacity in overlay blend. Strong overlay draws the same pattern in soft-light blend at higher opacity, with the intensity slider mapping to roughly 4% to 14%. The pattern is fixed: it does not move or change between frames.

Separately, the grid noise itself shifts the hue, lightness, and saturation of every cell on every cycle. That part is animation, and it is also what makes single clean frames harder to pull out of the clip.

Why a fixed high-frequency pattern

A common way to clean noisy video is frame averaging: stack many frames and average them, so anything that changes from frame to frame cancels out. The per-frame grid noise disappears under that attack. The overlay does not, because it is identical in every frame. What survives averaging is your image plus a persistent 2-pixel checkerboard, which leaves visible texture in flat areas and adds pixel-level detail that automated pipelines have to filter before the image is clean.

What it does not do

• It is not adversarial noise. Research tools such as Glaze and Nightshade compute perturbations against specific model families. This overlay is a fixed pattern with no model in the loop.
• It does not survive everything. Downscaling, blurring, or strong JPEG or video compression can weaken or fully remove a 2-pixel pattern.
• It does not prevent training. A pipeline that is willing to spend effort on your image can filter it. The honest claim is friction and a visible statement of intent, nothing stronger.

Check it yourself

1. Export a clip with Strong overlay at high intensity.
2. Open the export and zoom to 400%. You should see the checkerboard in flat areas.
3. Re-compress the clip (for example, upload it to a platform that re-encodes video) and zoom in again. If the pattern is gone after re-encoding, you know exactly how much protection survived your publishing path.

A note on the old "Deep Protect" name

Earlier builds of this tool kept the reference interface's "Deep Protect" label, along with epsilon and step sliders and a Prepare button. In this implementation those controls only ever changed the opacity of the fixed pattern described above, so the name and the extra controls overstated what was happening. The control is now a single intensity slider, and this page is the full description of what it does.

Practical settings for combining the overlays with grid noise are in the settings guide.