BLUE ECHO

digital screenshots make the blacks appear darker than they would have when u watched it on ur tv as a kid. the contrast is also a bit bumped up on modern screens. you're not ever going to see this in HD, the lines will always be kind of blurry and they have a halo effect with some rainbow distortions (you can see it clearly on the front claws). it looks crunched whether by digital artifacts or just being a low res image

so for my pic i made 2 versions, one i'll call the 2010s anime version when digital effects like gradient lighting, slight glow, strong dark blacks, and a kind of realistic dark palette (for what it is) were en vogue

you remember seeing something that looked roughly like this in like maybe 2016. notice how it's different to the base drawing below because you probably weren't streaming in 1080p back in 2016...

^ this has a bit of blur on it and a teensy amount of chromatic aberration. duplicate this layer and blur the fuck out of the copy. then lower the opacity of the blurred layer. you get this slight blurry glow around everything

and this is fine for that 2010s look but we can make it look... crappier. duplicate the base layer again (the lowest in the stack of 'inserted images') and gradient map it to something with the values almost inverted

wahoo he looks cool. set that sucker to 'vivid colour' or whatever layer blending mode looks good (i've been using different ones in every single one of these fake screenshots, it's just whatever feels good in the moment). we achieve the halo around the lines by taking this layer and moving it a bit to the side, then lowering the opacity to a point that looks good (i think this is like 50%?). this also has the effect of washing out that high contrast and making the blacks paler while also intensifying the primary colours so it looks more like the fun adventure shonen of your youth instead of a moody demon slayer ripoff. wow awesome now we once again copy the whole canvas and paste into the pic (highlighted layer below is this), so that we have a single layer which is a flattened version of the three layers under it, so we can work on all of these at once.

i added a noise effect to this one to make it look kinda grainy. it's giving beyblade. but i still felt it was just a bit too sharp. so now we duplicate this AGAIN. and this time we are adding horizontal motion blur and stronger chromatic aberration specifically to mimic bleed

take this and then once again find a layer blend mode that makes it look like u want it to look. i chose 'colour'. the final pic has this top layer set to about 30% iirc? but here is what it looks like at 100%:

now it looks like the signal or the video cables are fucked up and it's flickering nauseatingly as you're trying to watch and all the colours are messed up and the contrast is fucked up you can barely see what's going on behind his head and this is what makes u think of the crt and vhs experience. because back then you could not see what was happening most of the time and you loved it. and then get this i transported the pic to my pc, opened it in GIMP, and blurred it one last time.