Image Glitching Exploration

Following my conversation with Rosie on my photography project, I decided to explore the idea of glitching images and removing data in an accidental or random way. I agree with what she said when she suggested that the random and accidental essence of image glitches was something I shouldn't really want to lose to follow my idea and create a full effect.

After some quick googling, I quickly came up with some ideas of how corruption in images can occur:

open the file as text using notepad and delete the first 10 or more lines of text and replace with a bunch of random letters and numbers.

 This post was in a forum from a few years ago and I was unsure as to whether this would work now because of the advancement of operating systems and programs in windows. I was proved right when I tried it a few times and the file came up as corrupted and not view able.

Next I looked at possible online programs I could use to create a similar effect.

The first few images are from a site called Corrutus 3.5, which is a web program where you upload a photo to the site and you click a mode you want it to take in the method of glitching your image and you get a few results to choose from:

The good thing I found about this method is that it is completely random, providing you don't know all of the modes and what they do. The site tells you how the glitching is achieved and you leave the rest to them.

I then tried another site which is an image glitch experiment. In this one, you can upload an image and control the amount of glitching, and how it is glitched, or you can also completely randomise it:

I liked the effect that this gave, although I was disappointed somewhat as the glitching was all very similar, with just different colours and different parts of the image showing, which I felt wasn't random enough and didn't reflect fully what I wanted to show.

The drawback of both of these methods is that they are relatively easy to achieve, and while it creates a nice effect, I feel like it wasn't self-created and I don't know whether I'd be happy letting something else create this corruption. So, I looked at more ways I could create this effect and came across the suggestion of a HEX editor in a forum, which would allow me to change the values of the data in the jpeg to create something perhaps that is viewable, although I haven't had chance to experiment with it yet. However, I would like to experiment with corrupting CR2 files as well as jpegs to see what effect that may give as well.