Acid

Colour separates at every edge and crawls. The image stays where it is while its component colours drift apart, so the frame feels unstable without anything in it actually moving.

It reads as a signal problem rather than a lighting choice, which is why it carries a sense of something going wrong with the recording rather than with the scene.

The three colour channels are offset from each other by a few pixels in different directions. Where they overlap you get the original. Where they do not, you get a rainbow fringe along the outline.

Real lenses do this at the corners and call it chromatic aberration. This look takes that failure, applies it everywhere, and pushes the separation far past what glass would produce.

Saturation goes up with the offset, so the fringes glow rather than sitting as pale ghosts. Crawling means the offset changes frame to frame instead of holding still.

Use it on a beat of disorientation, a glitch, or a hard cut into a different state. Short bursts work better than a sustained treatment.

Skip it when the subject has to stay legible for long. Fringing at this strength competes with every edge in the frame, including the ones carrying information.

LSD warps the room itself. Walls breathe, geometry bends and colour smears behind movement, so the space is wrong rather than the recording.

The check is whether anything has moved. Straight lines that are still straight, with colour crawling off their edges, mean Acid. Walls that have changed shape mean LSD.

The fringing swallows the subject and the face stops reading, which is the trap the entry warns about. Say the face stays readable underneath the fringing, and keep the offset described as edges rather than as a full overlay.

The other failure is a clean image with a faint rainbow edge that barely registers. Ask for saturated spectrum fringing crawling around every outline, and ban clean edges and muted colour.