A filter workshop
Each one is grounded in published research or an exact construction, then tuned by eye on real photographs. For GIMP, Photoshop and the desktop, and on the command line for enterprise pipelines.
Before After The filters
Beta pricing, live now
01 · Bloom and glare
Glow that follows the eye, not a blur slider.
Multi-pass bloom, ported from a game engine’s post-processing chain to still images, plus the four kinds of glare the vision literature measures separately: veil, corona, halo and streaks. Bright light spills the way it does on a retina, and it eases into the headroom below white instead of clipping into a flat disc.
Before After 02 · Pattern dithering
Halftones drawn with distance fields.
Classic error diffusion and Bayer dithering, then a pattern stage that redraws the image with tiled shapes: dots, lines, hexagons, stars, crosshatch and brick. Every shape is a signed distance function, equalized so ink coverage tracks the tone for any shape, and thresholded softly or hard with antialiased edges.
Before After 03 · Distressed type
Type that wears by real distances.
Set a phrase in a real font, properly shaped, then turn the letters into a signed distance field and wear the field down. A wear layer bites a set number of pixels deep, so hairlines break before stems do. Ink bleed is a true blur of the field, not pixel morphology. Then threshold it back into ink.
04 · Masks
Masks from gradients and keys, snapped to edges.
A mask is a stack of up to eight layers. Each is a directional gradient or a key on one of the image’s channels, and each goes through the same response curve, so combining them takes one blend mode. “Blue, but only near the top of the frame” is a sky mask. An edge-aware pass then pulls the transitions onto real edges in the photograph.
Before After 
Before After Research, then tuned by eye
A veil of scattered light from the eye’s point spread function. Needles from particles in the lens. A rainbow ring. Streaks from the iris. The vision literature measures them separately, so the filter computes them separately, in linear light, sized in degrees of visual angle.
How the filters are made →Where they run
The same library backs every host, so a preset renders the same pixels in GIMP, Photoshop, the desktop app and a build script. Buy a filter once and use it in GIMP, Photoshop and the desktop app. The command-line tools come with Enterprise.
A native GIMP 3 plug-in written in C, with the filter linked in statically. GIMP 3.0 or later, Linux and Windows.
A UXP panel running the filter as WebAssembly. Photoshop 2024 (25.0) or later, macOS and Windows.
Distortionary for the desktop: open, adjust with a live preview, export. Linux and Windows; macOS later.
Enterprise only. The same filter as a command-line tool, for batches, build scripts and render farms. Settings load from JSON presets.
Pricing
No subscription and no account. A single filter is $19; all four plus the desktop app are $49. Buy during beta and the license carries through 1.x at no extra cost.
Complete set $49, $89 at 1.0
A small workshop, on purpose
Distortionary is David Berube's filter workshop. Each filter starts from published research or an exact construction (a point spread function, a distance field, a guided filter) and is then tuned by eye on real photographs until it looks right. The catalog is small on purpose. A filter ships when it runs the same in every host and holds up on a full-size image.
Read the method →Still on the bench
Blends two fonts into a letter neither has: sets a phrase in both, fits one to the other’s spacing, averages their distance fields. A stroke halfway between a hairline and a heavy stem comes out halfway thick, not gray.
The same blend by outlines. Fits one shared set of Bézier curves to both fonts with a differentiable rasterizer, then interpolates control points, so the result stays a vector and saves as SVG.
Each gets its own page when it’s finished. Not before.
