Digital Image Techniques
Each brings the smallest units of an image, or the machinery of its compression, to the surface, so coarseness and breakdown count as method instead of defect.
Dictionary entry
- Pixel Art 1970s– / Technique
Treats the pixel as an honest unit, building clear form from limited resolution and palette.
- Datamosh 2005– / Technique
Deliberately breaking a video's keyframes so that the previous image is dragged along and dissolved by the next motion. The technique turns the inner workings of the compression algorithm into an aesthetic.
- Isometric Pixel Art 1994– / Style
Endless pixel cities in vanishing-point-free oblique view. eBoy's pixoramas established the mode, exporting games' isometric projection into print and advertising as a graphic language.
- Pixel Sorting 2010– / Technique
Pixel Sorting selects image pixels by a brightness or hue threshold and reorders them within rows or columns, drawing long color streaks out of a still-recognisable source image. Kim Asendorf's released code enabled widespread reimplementation.
- Dithering 1960s– / Technique
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.
- Cel Shading 1990s– / Technique
Cel shading quantizes continuous 3D lighting into a few flat bands and may add contours, retaining spatial movement while making the surface read like animation cels or printed illustration.
- Databending 2000s– / Technique
Databending edits image or sound files with tools not intended for their format, turning a decoder's misreading into the work; file structure, compression and edit position determine its bands and color shifts.
- Voxel Art 1990s– / Style
Voxel art divides three-dimensional space into equal volume elements and leaves those units visible as the smallest pieces of form and color, carrying pixel art's productive limits into volume.