Glitch your photos

James Paterson uses a combination of filter effects and layer skills to make a fun digital glitch effect in Affinity Photo

- James Paterson

A corrupted photo file will usually send us photographers into a cold sweat, but as a visual effect, it can result in a striking photograph. In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to get the pixelated glitch to look in Affinity Photo using a range of simple tools.

We’ll begin here by making two copies of our layer then apply the Pixelate filter to each layer in varying amounts. This handy filter effect breaks our image up into a series of colored blocks, each an average of the segment of image underneath.

By utilizing blend modes we can combine the different pixelated versions of our picture. Once that’s done, we can select little slivers of the pixel blocks then shift them slightly to enhance the glitch effect in the image. Along the way, we’ll encounter several fundamental Affinity Photo editing tools, such as layer masks, adjustment layers, and Curves.

To complement the pixelated look we’ll also skew the colours in parts of the image by creating a red version of our photograph, then use the Exclusion blend mode for a striking colour effect. This can be strengthened with a combination of simple tonal adjustments, each applied using a different layer so that they all stay independent from one another and remain endlessly editable.