Board Thread:General Wiki Discussion/@comment-43857428-20191007191501/@comment-44100374-20191011220643

Just spitballing...

They probably cut out Squidward, placed him over an existing stock photo of some black and white curtains, over saturated the eyes, and then painted around them with a black fuzzy brush. All of this before turning down the saturation on the whole image even more to give it a washed out look.