How to create the Glitch effect in Adobe Photoshop

Hi there, this video is all about the Glitch effect. We're going to take this image and kind of wiggle it around to look like it's distorting. Leave and add some kind of brush strokes to kind of make it look like all sorts of grungy matrix hacking stuff is going on. All right, let's jump into the tutorial. 

In your '06 Color', open up 'Glitch Effect 1'. So we're going to do a kind of a Glitch Anaglyphic effect. So what we're going to do is, double click the background, and this is going to be the cyan layer. Anaglyphic is that kind of cyan and red look. 3D glasses type thing. I'm going to duplicate, instead of dragging it down, a cool little shortcut, with this selected, hit 'Command J'. That is a cool shortcut that just doesn't appear anywhere, there's no like, like a long version of it, you just need to know, but because you're advanced, you know, 'Command J' just duplicates the layer. 

Another cool trick is, if you have lots of layers, if you select them all and hit 'Command J', it kind of squishes them together and makes a copy. It's all in one little layer. Anyway, 'Command J', this one here though is going to be called 'Red'. So two channels, what I need to do to make that anaglyphic effect is, right click 'Red', go to 'Blending Options'. Actually there's a couple of ways, 'fx', this one's easier. Well not easier but it's the way we've been using so far. There's ten ways of doing everything, so I'm on 'Red', I'm turning off everything except for the Red Channel. Cyan, the same thing, go to 'Blending Modes', and this one here we're going to say, we're going to turn just the red off, and it leaves the cyan color behind. You don't have to do this kind of red, cyan, you can play around with turning these different ones on and off to get different colors. 

So to do the manual kind of glitch, just grab the 'Rectangle Tool', 'Rectangle Marquee Tool', and just kind of grab a chunk of it. I'm using the Red Layer, and I'm going to grab my 'Move Tool', I'm just going to drag it to this way. You get that kind of like anaglyphic glitchy effect-- So 'M' for the Marquee Tool, I'm going to grab this chunk. I'm going to grab cyan, and just kind of messing about and deciding how much Glitch effect you want. So I'm going to speed this up, I'm just going to grab some pieces and move it all. But now we want to do that kind of like wobbly wiggly thing. 

So there's two ways of doing it. There's a way that looks kind of nicer, but is super slow on your computer. So I'm going to do a 'File', 'Save' just in case it crashes. So it's saved, I'm going to grab the-- over here, we want the Smudge Tool. Yours is probably set to Blur, go to 'Smudge', pick a brush size, I picked a really big one, mine's at like 900. The Strength set to '52', it's not really that important. The important thing is to go slow, watch this, I'm going to click, hold, and drag to the left. It's still working, it's like pretty creepy, kind of like slowly moving its way out there, so if you go wiggle, wiggle, your machine, the fans are going to come on and it's going to go pretty slow. 

So I'm going to work on cyan and-- that's cool. So if you're happy to work that kind of slow way, that's fine, you can definitely use that effect. What I want to do is show you a different way. I'm going to use the Liquify, so 'Filter', 'Liquify'. You can see it's only showing me one of the channels, that's fine. Over here you can-- so 'Show Backdrop' to show the whole lot, but we're still only affecting that one cyan layer, because we had it selected but we can see at least everything. I'm going to use the first brush here, the 'Forward Warp'. Pick a brush size, start working, and, it won't work, background’s on, so don't have that on. Brush size up, and I quite like doing a wiggle, so left right, left, right. It doesn't look very exciting here but let's come back out, and because it's part of that channel it's doing some cool stuff back in here. So back in, and yes, just do some experimenting. 

So we're using the Forward Warp, you can experiment with Pucker or Bloat. Use Bloat on that channel, nice big brush. I'm going to do some stuff over here just to see what it looks like, when things get bloated. You might have to play around with size and rate. Might be going a bit too fast or a bit too slow, it's at a twirl just because. Let me see what's happening. Right back to the Forward Warp Tool. I'm going to do some things, kind of arrows here. I am not going to do that. Let's just try some small bits just out of here. Don't want to destroy his face, he's the kind of-- just look weird. Awesome. Subtle? Yes, it's okay. 

To add the brushes, it's-- we're not going to do it with these channels, we're just going to fake it. So a new layer here, this is going to be my 'Red Brush'. I'm going to grab my 'Brush Tool', I'm going to find in here. So in the new version of Photoshop, well, the updated version, if you can't see these General, Dry, Wet-- you're not going to see Drips and Smoke. Those are ones that I've installed separately, that we did in the Essentials course of Photoshop, but hopefully you've got a newer version of Photoshop, and you can see Special Effects Brushes. And here's some really cool stuff, so any of these, I'm just going to pick, Supreme Splatter, that's going to work for me. I need to pick a color. So I'm going to use the Eyedropper Tool to go-- I'm going to pick some red to start with. I'm just using the red that's come from that channel. 

Back to my Brush Tool, make it kind of big, I'm just trying to like do some, splattery stuff. Maybe a bit too much. That brush is a bit hard core for me. Get rid of this first one, like just kind of-- there we go. It's a little bit less. Not a lot of space. I'm going to do another one on the Cyan Channel. Well, not Cyan Channel, I'm going to just have a Cyan brush. That same brush, just going to use the cyan, there's a good chunk of it there. I'm just doing some bits to make it look like it's kind of grungy and distorted. A couple of really big ones. Some really big ones are at the front, I might do it on its own layer, because, see these big ones here? I want them to kind of feel like they're close to the camera. So I'm just going to blur them to kind of fake the Depth of Field. 'Blur', 'Gaussian Blur'. So it looks like they're kind of out of focus and kind of close. You like it? 

All right my friends, that is the Glitch Effect. We did just two of these. You could separate them all out so you could have red, green, and blue. You could experiment with going to CMYK and splitting out four channels. All right, let's get into the next video.