Sigiling Selfies: How to Anti-Taglock Pictures of Yourself
So @dontusemycauldron mentioned this to me at some point, and it took a few days for it to really sink in. They told me how some people put sigils on their photos to prevent people from using them as taglocks for things like cursing. And I went, “well holy shit, that is fucking clever,” and proceeded to do it with every single one of my selfies I’ve posted to Tumblr. Not because I’m concerned, but I like to put faith in preventative measures.
I decided I was going to show you guys how to do it - at least with SAI, because that’s the program I tend to use for art things now (and I can’t find a good crack of Photoshop anymore). However, any art or digital media program that makes use of layers and transparencies can be used for this technique.
First off, you want your sigils. I made two personal ones, and I also made two for Tumblr use. However, I’m going to recommend that you create your own sigils with your own statements of intent, if you can.
“This photo is bound from being used as a taglock.”
“This photo is not successfully used as a taglock for cursing.”
Ideally, you want digital sigils with transparent backgrounds, so you can avoid as much visual disturbance to your picture - you don’t want people to see or know there is anything over top of it, right?
Anyway, now on to the (SAI) tutorial!
Open your selfie and your sigils; you can switch between them along the bottom of the SAI window. Copy and paste the sigils onto your picture. I do this by clicking on the sigil’s canvas, hitting Ctrl+A and then Ctrl+C, then selecting the canvas with the selfie and hitting Ctrl+V. I can show the screen commands, however, for those that aren’t so tech savvy:
The “paste” option is also in the “edit” menu, as you can see. When you’ve done that, your selfie should look something like this:
Well, you know, you won’t look like me…but your sigils will have pasted in the top left corner of your picture. And they’re very obviously visible. BUT fortunately we’re not done with it yet.
Arrange your sigils over top of the face part of the selfie, however you want. I didn’t specify before, but the icon that looks like the cross with the arrows on each end (highlighted in blue here) :
…that’s the move tool; click on that, then on each separate layer, and you can move the layer around as you wish.) You definitely wanna do this before you change any of the transparency of the sigils, while you can still see them. Ultimately it doesn’t matter how you arrange them, just as long as they are on your face. Mine look like this:
It almost makes a heart shape, lol. So, those familar with SAI know where to look to see the layers. Mine were on the left-hand side by default, I know that is something you can change, however. They look like this:
On the bottom you can see the separate layers - your picture, and the sigils each on their own layer. Above that, you can see the “mode” and “opacity” tools. Those are the ones we care about.
Experiment with the mode if you want - it isn’t required, but it can help. I like to put mine on “overlay,” because it adds to the visualization of the sigils seeping into the picture and blending in to it. You need to click on each separate sigil layer to apply the mode. That makes it look like this:
And with that we’re almost done! Finally, just change each of the sigil layer’s opacity to 1% by clicking on the opacity bar and dragging it almost all the way down. You want them to not be at zero because they still need to be on the pictures and not “off,” but if you put them at any higher than 1%, you can still see them, and you definitely do not want people being able to see the sigils. Once you’re done that the selfie look like this:
Can you even tell there are sigils over top of that? There are. Four sigils, now, actually, lol. And this is how the layers look over on the side in SAI:
As you can see, the mode has been set to overlay on both, and they are both at 1% opacity. From there, save your picture (file, save as), feeling free to specify in the title that one has been magic’d. Then, you can upload them without any worry!
Of course, this can be done with sigils for other purposes - I just made this post with the intention of preventing selfies being used as taglocks, because that’s what I did to mine today. However, you can easily apply any sort of glamours to your selfies, if you desire.
I hope this helps anyone, or inspires anyone! Let me know if you have any more questions, or if I wasn’t so clear about things! This is my first time making a tutorial for any art program, I dunno if I did any good… But, yeah, just let me know if you have more questions or anything! :)
