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ilzolende comments on Open thread, Feb. 9 - Feb. 15, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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In terms of photos, I use a self-portrait that is artistically edited to the point of near-unrecognizability (and is unsearchable via Google Images) for my profile picture, and used to use a silhouette. My cover/background picture is something I made in Apophysis and Photoshop that I thought looked nice. You may not actually need a photo at all. If you want a less artificial cover/background image, take a nice close-up photo of some plant or something else visually appealing in your area, then edit it a bit.
For a "good photo", you may want to take a passable photo, apply the basic touch-ups (the Spot Healing brush is great for acne, small cuts, and out-of-place hair), and then perhaps overexpose or otherwise apply a visually appealing edit to the image such that it looks like you, but obviously edited. (Here's an overexposed picture.) It's hard to go too wrong with taking a shower and wearing some of your nicer clothing, standing in front of a white wall, and getting a friend to take a picture while you smile a bit.
Your avatar/profile pic should look good at small scales. You want your face, not your body.
You don't need to post a lot of pictures: just enough to make people know who you are, and using a real name with a location should be sufficient for that.
In terms of other content: you don't care about listing what movies/books/games you like, just write a good description of yourself. Follow some accounts you like, join groups that you participate in IRL. Post interesting links with commentary occasionally. Don't use the account to get into too many comment-section arguments.
Hello. Person experienced with Photoshop here. Most of the time that stuff looks positively painful, and an honest picture of a pimple isn't nearly as bothersome as bad editing. And human vision isn't fooled easily; consider for instance when you edit a stray hair strand out of existence. You see it beginning at the hairline, disappear across the area of interest (say, face), then continue down the neckline. Ouch.
I've even seen moderately decent photo edits that, to the experienced eye, have Surface Blur written all over them (Gaussian Blurring skin is for newbs, by the way). Even cosmetics print ads have understood sometime during the last two decades that pores are a good idea. If you don't know what you're doing, don't do it.
The only non-horrid edits I've seen applied by amateurs to photos are subtly applied color actions, and if your only tool is Picasa even those get boring after the first 200 or so photos.
I concur that you need some basic competency in photo editing before you start to photoshop your face :-)
Surface Blur, I think, is good either in subtle amounts (you DO want to sharpen the skin differently from e.g. eyes or hair) or -- since we are talking about "artistic edits" -- you can go completely overboard and make a fully plastic face. That is also fine as long as you understand this is going to be an in-your-face :-) image and not the I-tried-to-look-pretty-and-failed one.
That's actually a pretty standard way of doing it wrong. You end up with a passport picture, basically, suitable for official documents but not for much else.
Especially if you want to get creative with filters or do a barely-recognizable semi-abstract.
The goal here is make an interesting picture, not that resembles the one on your driver's license.
Clearly, I do not understand the goal here. It would be useful to know not only the point of a profile picture but also UnrequitedHope's goal in creating a Facebook account.
On a social media platform, the purpose of a profile picture is to be a picture of your personality, as you wish it to be perceived.
I don't think that's the only purpose. It's also to become familiar to people. If people frequently see your picture, you feel familiar to them. That's easier with a picture where you are easy to recognise. That means a profile picture that doesn't show much more than your face and thus doesn't leave much room for personality signaling.
This theory does not survive cursory browsing of Facebook profile pics. We visually express personality mainly through the face. A profile picture that doesn't show much more than your face still has all of that room for personality.
It depends what you mean with expressing personality. A facebook photo that shows you engaging in a certain hobby does show a certain value of your personality. Face only pictures don't have much room for that.