This paper looks at the aesthetics of digital portraiture in contemporary Egypt, with a specific focus on martyrologies of the January 25th Revolution. Among the many effects of the passage from analog to digital photography is the blurring of boundaries between “professional/studio” and “amateur/candid” photography. I will be looking at digital portraiture and especially post-production photo manipulation regardless of whether it is produced by a studio or by a skillful “amateur”. I examine the visual language that “photoshopping” encourages as well as the subsequent circulation and creative re-manipulation of private portraits in public, in both actual (homes, shops, streets) and virtual spheres. The first part of my paper examines digital portraiture as a genre, analyzing its visual language and cultural codes (backgrounds, poses, props). I will discuss ways in which particular aesthetic choices encode class identity, especially through competing visions of masculinity; and how they construct a professional hierarchy of high, low and middle-brow within the commercial digital market. The second part of my paper focuses on the digital afterlives of one particular group of portraits, namely young male martyrs of the January 25th Revolution. I will explore three distinct instances of their “afterlives”, embedded in different social contexts and addressing different audiences. One is stencilization which erases the earlier mentioned class-inflected masculinity in favor of universalized images of “young martyrs,” eliciting affect but emphatically denying class; another is “artification” or sublimation through high art as evident particularly in street art, where I will look at distinct elements of martyr grafitti as consisting of both “photographic” and “painterly” elements, and different audience responses to both. Thirdly, I will look at martyrs’ portraits framed and hung on walls in their own homes, becoming part of private mourning sanctuaries. Here, they must be substantially digitally re-manipulated again, in order to fit into long-established conventions of wall portraits of patriarchs and other images (with whom they often hang side-by-side) that encode social and/or religious authority. This paper is based on long-term fieldwork in Cairo and online. Methodologically, it is grounded in photographic history and theories of photographic vernacularity. It looks at how local vernacularity is produced historically, how it evolves over time under the impact of social, cultural and technological change, and how the accessibility of creative digital manipulation (too often glossed as a “global” phenomenon) produces a surplus of meaning that in turn requires more “deep local history.”