Trying to recreate glitched looking photos

[Aaralli]

About six years ago, I was taking photos on a school field trip with a Canon Rebel T6. Instead of a normal SD card, I was using some random old 16GB micro SD card in an adapter in the camera. When I took it home to review photos, most of them had really interesting little glitches in them. Some photos had inverted colors, some lacked contrast, some had swapped the left and right side of the frame, and some just had what looked like an orange or blue overlay over parts of the image. Honestly, some of those photos looked REALLY COOL IMO. I tried to recreate them with my EOS 90D, and adapter, and a 256GB Samsung Card I had lying around, but it did not come out the same. Every photo was pristine and perfect. My question is, does anyone know how those photo glitches happened, and how I can recreate them?

[Ralphred]

Sounds like randomly flipped bits, do you know what format they were stored in?

I messed around changing random bits of a jpg image in a hex editor, and it did (as you would expect) create artefacts, but 

50 minutes ago, Aaralli said:

some just had what looked like an orange or blue overlay over parts of the image

sounds like bits flipped in some greater "definition" code that affects the rest of the image.

Knowing the format will help to try and identify where you might want to "break things" to achieve mage wide effects.

[Fascinated Viewer]

On 7/14/2022 at 6:44 AM, Aaralli said:

About six years ago, I was taking photos on a school field trip with a Canon Rebel T6. Instead of a normal SD card, I was using some random old 16GB micro SD card in an adapter in the camera. When I took it home to review photos, most of them had really interesting little glitches in them. Some photos had inverted colors, some lacked contrast, some had swapped the left and right side of the frame, and some just had what looked like an orange or blue overlay over parts of the image. Honestly, some of those photos looked REALLY COOL IMO. I tried to recreate them with my EOS 90D, and adapter, and a 256GB Samsung Card I had lying around, but it did not come out the same. Every photo was pristine and perfect. My question is, does anyone know how those photo glitches happened, and how I can recreate them?

I did this for a project at a British college (not uni), and the way I did this was with a binary code editor called HxD, and I just edited the code to get different images; however, this can affect the image entirely so you may not be able to open the image up again so always make another copy and work on that instead.

The blue overlay is from changing the bit that contains the RBG infomration, which results in this, but you can get around this by getting lucky and experimenting