Good first impressions are extremely important, even if you’re making them over the Internet. Your profile picture is your first chance to represent yourself, regardless of what social media network you’re on, and often it’s just as important as the rest of the content on your page. So stop taking mirror shots and tinting your photos green and continue reading these tips for a sweet Facebook picture. Hope you “like” it!
Light up. Areas with soft light always make for beautiful photos. If you’re taking a close-up, having a light source behind you will cast a halo around your face. And that is a good thing.
There’s an app for that. If you’ve got a smartphone, tablet, or computer, you can add cool filters to your photos with a variety of applications, such as Instagram, Photo Booth, and PicStitch.
Go natural. If you want to avoid looking like you’ve spent all day practising your pose in the mirror, the best thing you can do is to use an activity as an opportunity to take a new profile picture. Going skydiving? Hanging out with some dolphins while on vacation? Cameras out!
Forget the “fun” filters. You may have played around with them for your MySpace or Hi5 profile, but it’s time to grow up. Stop making yourself glow pink and yellow and avoid using those stock filters.
Party time! If you’ve got a camera that lets you play with the shutter speed, change it to the “nighttime” or “slow-sync shutter” setting. You’ll get some trippy light effects on your party pictures, which always make for awesome photos.
Learn some Photoshop basics. Removing red-eye, auto-adjusting colour levels, and upping the contrast are all really easy editing tricks you can do to make your images shine and not scream, “I spent 20 minutes editing this picture in Picnik.”
