I’m going to use the Single Row Marquee Tool, but you can easily come back and experiment further once you get the hang of the technique. The Marquee Tool panel will reveal a choice between the Single Row Marquee Tool and the Single Column Marquee Tool. You may have to click and hold down the mouse over the Rectangular or Elliptical Marquee Tool until it reveals a small menu. On the Photoshop tools pallet, select the Single Marquee Tool. This means that if your history is so stretched that you can’t return to a certain spot during editing, there’s no going back. The process applies an effect directly to the layer you have selected. Pixel stretching, however, is by nature a destructive technique. This process is called non-destructive editing. To preserve layers, photographers use Adjustment Layers to apply adjustments to an image without altering it directly. It’s important that you don’t apply the pixel stretching technique directly to the original image in case you need to revert back to earlier stages of the project. Right-click on the Background layer and select Duplicate Layer. I’m using this photograph of blossoms because its colorful and I’m excited that it’s finally spring, here in Australia.ĭuplicate your original image, which will be labeled as Background in the Layers panel. It doesn’t have to be anything special, just an image with a few varying tones or colors. Getting startedįirst, open an image in Photoshop. Pixel stretching is one way to investigate the construction of a digital image through creative means.Ĭompared to other glitch-style editing techniques, pixel stretching is pretty straight-forward. The process involves selecting a single row or column of pixels and stretching them out over an image to create a warped, surrealistic visual effect. The results highlight the nuances of a digital image and explore the action of altering photographs through non-traditional means. And as technology progresses, so will the potential for image making. As photographers, we’re all too aware of the abundance of ways to edit a photograph in post-production.