How to look good on the internet: part one in an ongoing series! Photoshop! Photoshop! Photoshop!

 

 Okay, internet, remember how I told you how I wanted to be real with you?  Well, it was a half-truth.  I'm going to be just as fake as ever, but my resolve is simply to be completely transparent about my fakery.  We're co-conspirators in this whole illusory internet business!  And, really, nowhere is fakery more rampant than in the notorious userpic.  When you join a community, you pick a picture and then that picture is "you" as far as your "friends" or "followers" on said community are concerned. So the above is my Twitter avatar.  I was shooting for something accurately representational and "casual" which nonetheless conveyed some wry avuncularity.  Since the point of my twitter was to hone my one-liner skillz, I figured I should look comedian-ish.  Still, this pic is totally photoshopped and I am going to tell you how.

Why photoshop?  First of all, since most celebrity photos are photoshopped, I figured, "why should celebrities be the only ones who get to look unrealistically good in pictures?" Secondly, because I work in the arts and I've been around the internet block enough times to have a sense of "professionalism", I know that I want my online pics to look a step above "taken with my own outstretched arm in the bathroom mirror." The irony, however, is that this picture WAS taken with my own outstretched arm in the bathroom mirror.  But I felt like it had to at least LOOK sort of like a real headshot.  So here is what the picture started as:

 

So, rather than have you search out all the differences like some game in Highlights magazine, I'm just gonna run them down for you:

1. First and foremost was just to adjust the color/brightness to get rid of that yellowness that says "I took this pic in shitty incandescent light."

2. Second step was jacking up the redness of my hair and cleaning up those stray strands to make it look neater. Not only does this look punchier, but it's been my observation that nerds tend to have a thing for redheads, so it couldn't hurt to blatantly pander to my demographic in this particular way. 

3.  Next, was getting rid of those telltale signs of age.  Lose the eye wrinkles and the line at the corner of my mouth. Cool kids on the internet can't look old! Aging is for losers (unless you're trying to cultivate an persona of "wisdom" and "experience"... but still, that shit only works for dudes. Let's call a spade a spade.)

4. Okay, so then that left shoulder/arm?  The one that is obviously holding the camera?  How 'bout if I just push that down a little so it looks like this picture might have conceivably been taken by a "photographer" and not by me. 

5.  And now, my masterstroke!  I read somewhere that dilated pupils were a subconscious signifier of sexual arousal, so I MADE MY PUPILS BIG.  Oh, sure, I could have just put a pic of myself with blow-job lips and cleavage hanging out, but that shit's for amateurs.  If I am going to make my pic look "sexier," I'm going to do it like a fucking ninja.  BECAUSE I AM A FUCKING NINJA! 

So then I shrink my pic down to twitter avatar size and notice something amiss... my eyes actually look TOO large.  So then, irony of ironies, I photoshopped my eyes a teensy bit smaller so they wouldn't look photoshopped.

   

 Basically, reader, I want you to be in the loop.  The internet is full of chicanery and I'm exposing my own chicanery in hopes of illustrating the prevalence of chicanery. It's not 1998 anymore, so none of us needs to fall for this tomfoolery.