Hey, thank you for saying so. The reason for wanting that is that I might want to modify little bits in the future but I hadn't considered the things you've pointed out about it uncovering your techniques. You're right about a signature being easily removable from a .jpeg and it makes me curious as to what protections exist for artists in that sense, in a world with content-aware, other than just a legal agreement to not do the things you're rightly worried about.. I feel like asking that question makes me sound like a bit of an ass though. I hope that comes across as genuine curiosity and not some weird "aha! well what about.." thing.

I'm wondering if there's some middle ground in terms of layers where, say, large chunks of the .psd are merged together but give me the delineation I want though I am struggling to place exactly what delineation I want exactly, I just feel a bit uncomfortable not having the ability to edit the file if that makes sense.

My understanding of the copyright stuff is that, effectively, I'd be asking to purchase the copyrights as well as your design time. I understand that, by default, the artist has the rights unless specifically purchased by the client and that's why I was putting that up front rather than the story I seem to see a lot of online where an artist delivers on work and the client starts asking for the .psd files only after-the-fact (and which I understand they have no right to, unless agreed in advance).