Adventures in Databending

Accompany me as I learn to fuck around with pictures. Expect some NSFW stuff and a lot of cartoons. Pointers welcome.

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Bad shrooms.

Used nothing but GlitchSort. Source is this well-known Gravity Falls screengrab.

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Sunset on a bad place.

Source image is Sunset on Gerard Drive, by Grant Haffner.

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I can rave to this.

Source image by Elvira Trofimova.

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Life in plastic is fantastic.

Source image by Mariel Clayton.

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I wanted to see how badly I could mangle the image while keeping the creepy stare and grin.

Source is this screenshot of GOLB from Adventure Time.

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...and some things you must lose.

Source image is this very NSFW picture.

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Some things you get to keep...

Source image is this very NSFW picture.

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If I turn my head just right I can not only see places but… I can be places. 

Welcome to Night Vale, episode 44.

Original image is this screenshot from Child of Light.

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Originals by Ilya Kuvshinov (KRONPR1NZ).

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Death, Identity and Love. 

Used GlitchSort only.

Original images by the amazingly talented Ilya Kuvshinov (KRONPR1NZ), whose work I shall surely revisit.

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Atomic butterfly. Just messing around with GlitchSort.

Original photo is a Piña Colada micrograph by BevShots.

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Went ahead and experimented with captions, using the delightfully retro VCR OSD Mono font.

I used Audacity extensively, then Photoshop to add the caption and alter hue/saturation. Finally, I applied a bit of bubble-style pixel sorting to break the crisp edges.

Note: the Audacity Tremolo effect could be used to simulate VCR distortion in an interleaved image.

Original picture by Sara Worsham. Caption inspired by this poem by Franz Wright.

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Wordpad changed the focus of this piece from the lying figure to the peeping horse(s), but was otherwise fairly benign. I applied pixel sorting judiciously to preserve the readability of the scene.

Original art by Henry Fuseli.

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A beautifully armored Rose Quartz. Her powers seem to have a disrupting effect on whatever camera Greg is using to capture the moment. A caption might have looked cool on this, but I can’t think of anything.

Used GlitchSort for a variety of sorts and some aggressive denoising. It also allowed me to slightly misalign the color channels for an interesting Doppler-like effect. One of the sorts mangled the image beautifully, so I added the result to the original as a Photoshop layer (it’s most of the glare you see on the left side).

Original by Rita Dmitrijenko (Dark Tarou).

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Let’s kick this off with some smut. This is a very simple wordpad hack that turned out nice enough to share. I’ll probably experiment with this picture further to see if I can get a similar effect using Audacity to preserve the original colors.

Original model is Tori J for The Life Erotic.

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My very first attempt at databending. I obviously went way overboard by trying out every technique I could. At least I learned a lot from it. 

Used wordpad, Audacity, GlitchSort and a bit of Photoshop.