Image Dithering: Eleven Algorithms and Source Code (2012)
8 comments
·October 24, 2025bad_username
Dithering has similar importance in digital audio. Dithered 8-bit audio sounds way better than non-dithered (harsh artifacts are replaced with tolerable white noise, and quiet details are preserved). Higher end digital equipment even applies dithering to high-bit samples, as do plug-ins in digital audio workstations.
kevinsync
I use a Photoshop plugin for complex dithering (DITHERTONE Pro [0] -- this is NOT AN AD lol, I'm not the creator, just a happy customer and visual nerd)
I'm only dropping it in here because the marketing site for the plugin demonstrates a lot of really interesting, full-color, wide spectrum of use-cases for different types of dithering beyond what we normally assume is dithering.
gnabgib
(2012) Popular in
2016 (199 points, 61 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11886318
2017 (125 points, 53 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15413377
Panzerschrek
It's also worth to mention noise-based dithering - where some noise pattern is added atop of the image and then rounding is performed. Usually some sort of blue noise is used for this approach.
pasteldream
Agreed - blue noise dithering is very commonly used in computer graphics because it’s cheap and great, but it might be worth mentioning that it’s a kind of ordered dithering, which is mentioned in the article.
Christoph Peters’s free blue noise textures are the most commonly used, for people who can’t be bothered running void and cluster themselves: https://momentsingraphics.de/BlueNoise.html
Affric
Nostalgic.
Important for lo-fi displays and printing etc
I do think that well dithered images looked better in some texts than colour images which had more wow but were more distracting.
alejohausner
Ulichney (who wrote the book on halftoning) came up with ordered dithering matrices that give much nicer results than Bayer's, as good error as diffusion, and parallelizable. Look up "void and cluster".
It is surprisingly difficult to get really crisp dithering on modern displays, you have to do it on the client to match 1-1 the user’s display. Notice that the pre-rendered examples on this page actually look a little blurry if you magnify them. This is not really a problem unless you really want the crispness of the original Mac screen.
A few years ago I got annoyed with this and made a little web-component that attempts to make really sharp 1-bit dithered images by rendering the image on the client to match whatever display device the user has.
https://sheep.horse/2023/1/improved_web_component_for_pixel-...