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Why do we need dithering?

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Re: Why do we need dithering?

#11

Post by raajg »

This was recently shared on HN: https://visualrambling.space/dithering-part-1/

For anyone interested in seeing how dithering can be pushed to the limits, play 'Return of the Obra Dinn'. Dithering will always remind you of this game after that.

- https://visualrambling.space/dithering-part-1

- https://store.steampowered.com/app/653530/Return_of_the_Obra...

Re: Why do we need dithering?

#13

Post by TinkersW »

amelius wrote: post #7
debugnik wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just aesthetic, I keep seeing games with color banding because they don't bother to dither before quantizing.

From the article: > We don't really need dithering anymore because we have high bit-depth colors so its largely just a retro aesthetic now. By the way, dithering in video creates additional problems because you want some kind of stability between successive frames.

The article is simple wrong, dithering is still widely used, and no we do not have enough color depth to avoid it. Go render a blue sky gradient without dithering, you will see obvious bands.

Re: Why do we need dithering?

#14

Post by slabity »

amelius wrote: post #10
dTal wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the article is wrong about that.

It would be nice if you had some examples.

Acerola recently made a video about how Silk Song has banding with dark colors due to poor dithering (and how to fix it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=au9pce-xg5s

Highly recommend for any graphics programmer that might think dithering is unnecessary or simply a "aesthetic choice".

Re: Why do we need dithering?

#15

Post by susam »

This is going to be an odd comment, but I immediately recognised the parrot in the test images. It's the scarlet macaw from 2004 which is often used in many Wikipedia articles about colour graphics.

I think this is the original, photographed and contributed by Adrian Pingstone: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Parrot.red.macaw.1.a...

But this particular derivative is the one that appears most often in the Wikipedia articles: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RGB_24bits_palette_s...

This parrot has occurred in several articles on the web. For example, here's one article from a decade or so ago: https://retroshowcase.gr/index.php?p=palette

Parrots are often used in articles and research papers about computer graphics and I think I know almost all the parrots that have ever appeared in computing literature. This particular one must be the oldest computing literature parrot I know!

By the way, I've always been fascinated by dithering ever since I first noticed it in newspapers as a child. Here was a clever human invention that could produce rich images with so little, something I could see every day and instinctively understand how it creates the optical illusion of smooth gradients, long before I knew what it was called.

Re: Why do we need dithering?

#16

Post by dTal »

amelius wrote: post #10
dTal wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the article is wrong about that.

It would be nice if you had some examples.

A great many can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither

(also a very nice explanation of why dithering is a fundamental signal processing step applicable to many fields, not just an "aesthetic".)

Re: Why do we need dithering?

#20

Post by Dylan16807 »

amelius wrote: post #10
dTal wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the article is wrong about that.

It would be nice if you had some examples.

The average desktop computer is running with 8 bit color depth the vast majority of the time, so find or generate basically any wide basic gradient and you'll see it.
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