Your avatar on a social network is the simplest way of letting others recognize you for who you are and personalizing your experience. No matter if you’re a teenager or already have teenagers of your own, an avatar is something you have to create yourself. We don’t want any standard AOL avatars, now do we? Here are a few simple steps to creating and enhancing your own avatar.

Get the Tools

There are a lot of image editors that you can use to work with your images. If you’re accustomed to Photoshop, it’s probably the best tool to get the job done. Alternative, light weight image editors for the Mac include Acorn and Pixelmator. Free, but powerful image editors like Paint.NET for Windows and GIMP for Windows and Linux are surprisingly usable. For this kind of simple image manipulation you can also one of the awesome free online image editors such as Aviary Phoenix or Photoshop.com.

Choose Your Image

Choose Your Image Wisely

We’ve already covered what makes avatars awesome and now it’s time to use what we’ve learned. Choosing the image you want depends on what you want it to represent. The obvious choice is your own photo. You can either go with a classic portrait or try to be creative. I say try because you can easily go overboard and your creative aspirations can end up looking tacky. Let’s choose a nice plain portrait as our base image.

Enhance It

Go Fix!

In Photoshop, the easiest way to “fix” your image is to use the built in Auto color, Auto contrast and Auto levels options, located at Image > Adjustments. If you’re not getting the best results or want to tinker with the options yourself, you can set the contrast as well as levels manually. In this case, we used the Curves option to fix the shadows, mid tones and highlights. While this is a little more advanced, once you learn the logic behind it once, you’ll find it invaluable invaluable.

With avatars, we’re working on smaller images which mostly don’t need a lot of retouching, but if you still want to smooth out a person’s face, PSDtuts has a great face retouching tutorial. The alternatives to Photoshop also feature their variations on these options, but most of the work in the exact same way.

Choose the Angle

Choose the Angle

After we’ve spruced up your image, we have to “cut out” our avatar. That means getting the composition right by applying one of the essential rules of photography, the rule of thirds. Basically, the subject should occupy a third of the image space. If you don’t find yourself making the right composition naturally, just imagine three horizontal and vertical lines that divide the image equally.

The Avatar

Position the strongest element of your image on one of the points where the gridlines meet. Eyes are, for example, the strongest element in a portrait. Of course, as with all rules, this one is and should be broken. However, to break a rule, first we need to know how to use it, right? In our example, I’ve positioned the subject in the top left corner, with her eyes occupying one of the most prominent visual areas of the image.

What about you, how did you create your ultimate avatar?

Additional tutorials and tips

• 4 Easy Photoshop Techniques to Make Your Pictures Pop
• Absolute Beginners Guide to Photoshop
• Super Fast and Easy Retoucing