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.

Dithering — Ordered dithering with a 4×4 Bayer matrix, two-colour technical example — Joachim Holmér — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0 — Ordered dithering with a 4×4 Bayer matrix, two-colour technical example — Joachim Holmér — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0 · CC BY-SA 4.0Small source image · 323 × 48 px

Dithering — AI-generated interpretation 1 — AI-generated interpretation, not a reference work

Dithering — AI-generated interpretation 2 — AI-generated interpretation, not a reference work

At a glance

Visual 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

Best used for

Preserving photographic tone on low-color displays and e-paper
Using the grain of early computer images as deliberate digital material

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Dictionary entry

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

Pixel Art (ピクセルアート)Same Digital Image Techniques lineage.Compare Dithering and Pixel Art
Halftone (ハーフトーン（網点）)Shared effects: Technique / Nostalgia.Compare Dithering and Halftone

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