Pixel Sort

The sort is the easy part. The spans are the effect.

Take a run of pixels and reorder them by some key — that’s it, that’s the sort. If you sort a whole row you get a smooth gradient and you have destroyed the picture. Everything interesting about pixel sorting is the decision about where each run STOPS.

That decision is a threshold. Walk the row, and while the pixels fall inside a tonal band you keep collecting; step outside it and the span closes and gets sorted on its own. Structure the image already has — an edge, a bright window, a dark coat — becomes a wall the sort can’t cross. The picture keeps its bones and the sorted runs streak out of it.

Which is why the threshold controls do more to the look than the sort key does. Narrow the band and you get short, frequent streaks that read as texture; widen it and spans run halfway across the frame and the image starts to smear into ribbons.

What you sort by

Luma is the perceptually weighted brightness — green counts for most of it, blue for very little — so sorting by luma orders pixels the way your eye ranks them. Brightness weights the channels differently, and the two diverge most in saturated colour, where a strong blue that reads as dark by luma is not dark by brightness. On a desaturated image they are near enough identical; on a neon one they are two different effects.

Hue is the strange one, because hue wraps. It has no true minimum, so a hue sort produces bands of spectrum rather than a light-to-dark ramp — that rainbow streaking is a property of sorting a circular quantity on a line. Saturation pulls the greys to one end and the colour to the other, which separates a subject from a neutral background more cleanly than tone often does. And sorting by Red, Green or Blue alone ignores the other two entirely: the streaks order by one channel while the other two arrive in whatever order that leaves them, so colour scrambles as it sorts.

Direction, and sorting somewhere other than everywhere

Horizontal sorts along rows, vertical along columns. Vertical reads as drips and melt because gravity is the metaphor your eye reaches for; horizontal reads as speed and signal error.

The layer takes masks like any other, and the depth mask is the one worth knowing about here: give the layer a depth mask and the sort only runs at the distance you choose. A subject held out of the sort while the background streaks behind it is one control, not a composite.

When you’d reach for it

When you want damage that follows the image rather than damage sprinkled over it. Pixel sort is one of the few glitch effects whose output is completely determined by the picture — the same settings on two photographs give two unrelated results, because the spans come from the content.

Every option, from the app

Generated from the registry the app publishes, so this list is whatever the current build actually ships — not a copy of it.

Direction

HorizontalVertical

Sort By

LumaBrightnessHueSaturationRedGreenBlue

Related effects

• DatabendDatamosh-style buffer corruption in six modes — block smears, bitplane damage, bit-shifts, header skew, channel splits and byte swaps.
• Point CloudEvery pixel lifted into real 3D space by inferred depth and rendered as billboarded splats with true depth-buffer occlusion — six displacement fields, four materials, three environments, and a field channel another effect can drive.
• ASCIIImage to text art: per-cell luminance mapped through fifteen character ramps via a font atlas, with mono, source-colour, duotone and ANSI-16 colour.

Open the app to try it; the free effects work with no signup. Open V3KTR · all the FX · how it works