Dithering
ディザリング / 1960s– / Technique / Digital Image Techniques
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.
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
Dictionary entry
- Best used for
- Preserving photographic tone on low-color displays and e-paper · Using the grain of early computer images as deliberate digital material
- Type
- Use bitmap or simple sans type that remains intact at low resolution.
- Composition
- Build broad tonal fields but control diffusion around contours and copy.
- Material
- Fix the palette first, then pass quantization error to neighboring pixels or place dots with a threshold matrix.
- Caution
- Adding monochrome noise is not dithering. The limited colors must approximate the source value.
- Further study
- Floyd-Steinberg error diffusion / Ordered dithering / Limited color displays
Related entries
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- https://indexstyle.org/styles/dithering
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