My name is Donnie, and you suck at Photoshop.
You do, you're awful, and that's why you're here.
You Suck At Photoshop is a Webby Award
winning, 30 episode YouTube web series that premiered in December 2007. The series centers around a man named Donnie Hoyle, who wants very much for the viewer to know that they suck at Photoshop and that he's, very reluctantly, going to show them how to get better at it. While ostensibly a genuely informative 'how-to' series about how to use various Photoshop tools and techniques, it soon becomes clear that less-than-obscured subtext of the tutorials is the various ways in which Donnie's life is rapidly disintegrating.
You can find the channel behind the series here.
Not in any way related to You Suck at Cooking.
Provides examples of:
- Accentuate the Negative: Donnie thinks he's doing this to the audience. In fact, even a less-than-attentive viewer would be able to quickly determine that Donnie's the pathetic one and that his Photoshop skills are almost entirely the only thing he has going for him.
- Arc Words: In the second season: "I'm going to kill you, Donnie Hoyle. I am going to kill you." Every person that Donnie interacts with threatens him with this at some point, leaving it ambiguous as to who actually attempts to off him in the finale.
- Black Comedy: And how. The main character who teachers the viewer about Photoshop is an Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist, but his life is gradually falling apart, and worse and worse things keep happening to him.
- Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Donnie may be a complete jerk and may even be mentally disturbed, but he does know quite a bit about Photoshop and its intricacies. The videos all teach real things you can do with the program; it's just that they're interspersed with a ton of Black Comedy behind the voice of an Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist.
- Creator Breakdown: In-Universe. Every tutorial. The photos and various techniques that Donnie's using are inevitably a thinly-veiled representation of whatever's gone wrong in his life that week.
- Deadpan Snarker: Donnie thinks he's this as well. He isn't.
- Gainax Ending: The first season finale features Donnie somehow escaping a SWAT raid using Photoshop. The third season finale reveals that Donnie is Ricky and the entire series was just him sitting in his basement, playing sounds and pretending to be different people.
- Potty Failure: sn4tchbuckl3r tries to induce this in Donnie in episode 6 (and presumably succeeds).
- Sadist Show: So, how are we going to torture and torment Donnie this week?
- Title Drop: Every episode begins with Donnie informing the viewer that 'you suck at Photoshop'.
- Tomato in the Mirror: The Season 3 finale reveals that Donnie Hoyle was Ronnie Cox the whole time, and the events of the series consisted entirely of "Donnie" talking to himself in his basement after hitting his head in a "terrible fishing tacklebox accident".
- Toxic Friend Influence: Initially, at least, sn4tchbucl3r is not a great friend to Donnie.
- Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist: To be true, life has a habit of dumping all over Donnie, but it's made abundantly clear that he's not a particularly nice or stable guy anyway, and that it's in many ways his own fault.
