Instead of saturating images to show tint, I find it’s more revealing to normalize the brightness of each individual pixel. This basically eliminates differences in brightness, showing only the pure tint. The algorithm is really simple… just scale the brightness up until one of its color channels hits 100%. The color is otherwise unchanged.
Also, sometimes I blur the image first before putting it through the disco machine, to blend nearby pixels and reduce the impact of jpeg artifacts.
For example, given this beam shot someone posted on reddit… (I forget who; it seems to be deleted now)
Here’s what the disco machine spits out:
I think it’s a fine example of the “Cree rainbow” effect.