Pixel sorting
Pixels reordered by brightness or color into long horizontal or vertical bands, creating a stretched digital glitch.
See it
What it is
Pixel sorting takes runs of pixels in each row or column and reorders them by brightness, hue, or another value. The pixels come from the original image, but their new order pulls colors into long bands and melting glitch streaks.
Kim Asendorf's original Processing sketch is the reference point. The effect works when you want digital failure that retains the source palette and subject fragments: a threshold chooses which runs are sorted, and scan direction sets their travel.
Gotcha: sorting every pixel usually collapses the picture into bland stripes. Limit the effect to selected brightness ranges, protect the focal area, and keep some untouched regions so the viewer can recognize what has been disrupted.
Ask AI for it
Build a pixel-sorting effect that scans each image row, finds contiguous runs with luminance between 0.35 and 0.8, and sorts only those runs from dark to light. Leave pixels outside the threshold untouched, protect the subject's face with a mask, and preserve hard one-pixel row edges with no smoothing.