How much offset is right?

A few pixels at the corners and almost none at the centre. Anything larger stops reading as optics and starts reading as a mistake, which is a different look.

Is this the same as a glitch?

No. A glitch is data failing, so it produces blocks, repeats and torn rows. This is glass failing, so it produces smooth coloured fringes that follow the geometry of the frame.

Why does it hurt text?

Letterforms are made almost entirely of edges, so every one of them fringes at once. Keeping the effect off type is normal practice.

Chromatic Split

rgb split
chromatic aberration
colour fringing
anaglyph

The red, green and blue channels pulled apart, so every edge fringes in colour.

Draw this style

Opens an image model with the prompt in it. The price is on the page before you sign in.

What it is for

A lens bends each wavelength slightly differently, so colour separates at the edges of a frame. Exaggerating a flaw that every cheap lens has is a fast way to say photographed, and pushing it further says broken, which is why it carries both nostalgia and unease.

How it works

The three colour channels are offset from each other by a few pixels. Edges pick up a cyan fringe on one side and a red one on the other. The offset grows toward the corners and is near zero at the centre, because that is how a lens behaves.

When to use it

Use it for music, games and anything that should feel slightly unstable. Avoid it on text, which becomes hard to read immediately.

Told apart from its neighbours

Sprayed Halftone Comic uses the same fringing as one ingredient among several print defects. Glitch Art breaks the data rather than the optics. Dither is a palette limitation rather than a lens one.

Where it is used

It carries a poster, a title card, a game interface and any picture that should feel like a signal rather than an object.

Music video and title design
Game interfaces, posters and streetwear

The prompt

Replace the blanks with your own character, keep the rest. Then run it on an image model.

<character> with the colour channels pulled apart, the red, green and blue versions of the image offset from each other by a few pixels so every edge carries a coloured fringe, cyan on one side and red on the other, the offset increasing toward the corners and almost zero at the centre, the subject itself otherwise sharp and normal, a plain background where the fringing is invisible so it only shows on the edges that matter

Run it

What goes wrong

A uniformly offset image comes back that looks like a printing error. Ask for the offset to grow toward the corners and to be almost zero at the centre.

Leave out

a uniform offset across the whole frame, blur, a monochrome image, heavy distortion, an offset at the centre

Watch for

Almost nothing at the centre. Real fringing comes from a lens and grows toward the corners, and a constant offset everywhere reads as a broken export rather than as an optical effect.

Questions

A lens bends each wavelength by a slightly different amount, so the red, green and blue images do not land in exactly the same place. It grows toward the edge of the frame, where the light passes through the glass at a steeper angle.