How to Create a Cool Cyberpunk Avatar for Facebook

This simple Photoshop tutorial will teach you how to create a cool Cyberpunk avatar that is perfect for use on Facebook, in forums and message boards or on any other social network you may be a member of.




Start

First you will need a good picture of yourself, if you are going for the cyberpunk look don't forget the sunglasses! For our purposes it helps to have a picture of your face but, in truth, this works for any photo.

Step One

Create a new layer and the set it to "Color" then grab your paint bucket tool and dump a nice Green color onto the new layer. When you're done flatten the image by going to Layer>Flatten Image. Your photo should look a bit like this:

Step Two

Our next step is to go to Image>Adjustments>Brightness/Contrast and raise the contrast to "50". Feel free to use a different setting if it works better for you, the purpose of this step is to make the photo appear more like it's on a screen. It should now look a bit like this:

Step Three

Now, go to Image>Adjustments>Curves, we want to blow out the highlights a bit to help emphasize the idea of the photo being on a screen. Here is the curve I used:

Click "OK" and you photo should now look a bit like this:

Step Four

It's looking good so far but now we want to add a little glow around the photo. Click on the little "FX" icon at the bottom of your Layers palette and click "Inner Glow". Here are the settings I used:

Click "OK" and your photo should now have a nice glow like this:

We're almost done!

Step Five

Now we're going to want to add some text to the photo so that people will know who we are, you can add other information such as your website address or email if you'd like. Click on the Type Tool, change the font color to Green and click on the photo, move the text until you like the placement. Now find a font and font size that you like, I used the font "System", try to use a digital looking font. When you have your text exactly the way you like it go to Layer>Rasterize>Type, this will allow us to add a glow to the writing.

Click the little "FX" icon like you did before and select "Outer Glow", here are the settings I used:

Your photo should now look a bit like this:

Step Six

The only thing we need to do now is add some lines across the image to simulate a screen, these lines are called "Scan Lines" and will finish our look. To do this we need to define a Scan Lines pattern.

Go to File>New and create a new document that is 1 pixel by 1 pixel. Zoom in real far and go to Image>Canvas Size and adjust the settings so they look like this:

Click "OK" and go to Edit>Define Pattern and name it something like "Scanlines".

Now, go back to our Avatar image and create a new layer. Go to Edit>Fill and set it like this:

One more step, set this layer to "Overlay" and change the Opacity to about "50%". Go to Layer>Flatten Image and we're done! Make sure to save it as a JPEG and upload it to your favorite site!

Now we have a cool cyberpunk picture of ourselves to use as an avatar on Facebook or anywhere else we'd like. I hope this tutorial was informative, as always, if you have any questions please feel free to ask. Now that you're done take some time to check out some of my other tutorials. Thanks for stopping by!

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