Databending is taking a digital format and manipulating it with tools designed for other formats. For example, images hacked in a text editor, images edited with audio processors, etc. There are many ways to go about this and I’m just getting my feet wet with the concept. Today I played around with editing an image in a text editor.
The first step was to convert the .jpg to the uncompressed .bmp format (TIFF and RAW will also work). I did this with Skitch but any image editor can do it. You want to use an uncompressed format because there is more data to work with and they’re less fragile.
Here’s the original image (resized for the web)
