RGB split
The red, green, and blue layers of a picture nudged apart so every edge grows colored ghost copies, like a 3D-glasses image.
See it
What it is
An image is three grayscale layers (red, green, blue) stacked on top of each other. RGB split pulls them apart by a few pixels and lets them recombine, so anything with an edge sprouts a colored ghost: red leaning one way, cyan leaning the other. Wherever the three channels still line up, the original color comes back exactly as it was, which is why the fringing lives on edges and leaves flat areas alone. Those aligned areas only go white if they were already bright and neutral.
Reach for it on glitch headlines, hover states, error screens, and anything cyberpunk or broken-signal flavored. It is the cheap cousin of chromatic aberration: real lens fringing is radial and grows toward the corners, while an RGB split is a flat uniform offset, which is why it reads as digital corruption or print misregistration rather than optics. Push the offset a few pixels for a hint, ten-plus for full glitch.
Gotcha: it eats legibility. A 2px split on a 16px paragraph is unreadable and, since red/cyan pairs are literally the anaglyph 3D recipe, some people get eye strain from it. Keep it on display type and imagery, scale the offset with the font size instead of hardcoding pixels, and if you animate the jitter, kill it under prefers-reduced-motion.
Ask AI for it
Apply an RGB channel split to this element: extract its actual red, green, and blue channel planes (do not tint three copies of the whole image), shift the red plane about 4px left, leave green centered, shift the blue plane about 4px right, then recombine the three channels additively so aligned areas come back at the source's original colors and only the edges fringe. Keep the type crisp with no blur, clip the shifted channels to the element bounds, and add a subtle random horizontal jitter on hover for a glitch feel.