Dithering vs Pixel Art
ディザリング / ピクセルアート
Both sit in Digital Image Techniques, so the question is not what they belong to but how they behave. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Dithering
Dithering suggests unavailable intermediate colors by spatially mixing pixels from a limited palette; ordered matrices or error diffusion make both tone and a distinctive granular surface.
Pixel Art
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Treats the pixel as an honest unit, building clear form from limited resolution and palette.
| Dithering | Pixel Art | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1960s– | 1970s– |
| Family | Digital Image Techniques | Digital Image Techniques |
| Kind | Technique | Technique |
| Cues | Two or more pixel colors mixed as checks or grain / High-frequency dots spreading around tonal boundaries / Apparent gradients made from a fixed palette / A pattern up close that becomes an intermediate color at normal distance | Visible pixels / Limited palettes / Tiles / Sprites |
| Best used for | Preserving photographic tone on low-color displays and e-paper · Using the grain of early computer images as deliberate digital material | Icons and controls for small screens that stay clean when scaled up · Game characters and terrain that must read apart at tiny sizes |
| Type | Use bitmap or simple sans type that remains intact at low resolution. | Draw letters on the same grid, fixing cap height in pixels |
| Composition | Build broad tonal fields but control diffusion around contours and copy. | Scale only by whole multiples and keep every element on grid |
| Material | Fix the palette first, then pass quantization error to neighboring pixels or place dots with a threshold matrix. | Limited palette, dark outlines, neighboring hues to soften the steps |
| Caution | Adding monochrome noise is not dithering. The limited colors must approximate the source value. | Downscaling a photograph skips the decision behind every single pixel, and the contours turn muddy the moment the image is enlarged. |