Image Glitcher

Before CrasH Utils was a pack of fourteen nodes and five browser games, it was one node with its own repo: Image Glitcher. Its author folded it into the broader CrasHUtils collection in late 2023, but it's still doing exactly what it always did - taking a clean generation and roughing it up with chromatic aberration and CRT-style scanlines, based on a well-known JS glitch demo by Felix Turner that this node effectively ports into ComfyUI.

What it does and why you'd reach for it

If you want a VHS-damaged, broadcast-error, "this signal is corrupted" look on top of a normal image, this is a much faster path than hand-building it from color-channel-offset and noise nodes yourself. It's a one-stop degrade: split and shift color channels for the chromatic-aberration effect, then optionally lay CRT scanlines over the top. Good for retro/cyberpunk aesthetics, glitch art, or just roughing up an image that's looking a little too clean.

Inputs and outputs

• image - the image to glitch.
• glitchiness - integer 0–10, default 2. Controls corruption and chromatic-aberration intensity. (The README's own parameter table describes this as a 0–100 range in prose, but the actual widget only goes to 10 - that's just the docs describing an older version; don't go looking for a "50" setting that doesn't exist.)
• brightness - integer 0–10, default 0. Brightens the image, which is genuinely useful once scanlines are on, since scanlines darken things overall.
• seed - controls the randomized part of the glitch pattern, so you can lock in a specific look and reproduce it.
• scanlines - enable/disable toggle for the CRT scanline overlay.

Output is a single image. Small aside: if you ever poke at the node's raw output socket name in a saved workflow JSON, it's literally typo'd iamge in the code - harmless, doesn't affect anything, just a nice fossil of how old and unglamorous this node is.

Installing it

ComfyUI Manager: search "CrasH Utils". Manual:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes/
git clone https://github.com/chrish-slingshot/CrasHUtils.git

Restart ComfyUI. No extra dependencies - this is pure image math, nothing to download.

Common issues

Cranking glitchiness past 10 does nothing. The slider is capped there by design; if you want a stronger effect, chain a second Image Glitcher node after the first rather than expecting the single slider to go further.

Image looks muddy/dark with scanlines on. That's expected - scanlines subtract brightness by nature. Bump the brightness parameter up to compensate rather than assuming something's broken.

Same seed, different-looking result. If you've changed glitchiness or brightness between runs, the seed only controls the random component of the corruption pattern - it won't make two runs with different settings look identical, only two runs at the same settings reproducible.

Effect looks too uniform / same every time. If you want variation across a batch, randomize the seed per run instead of leaving it fixed - a locked seed at fixed settings will always produce the same corruption pattern.