Ditherpunk: The article I wish I had about monochrome image dithering • Hacker News Board

Re: Ditherpunk: The article I wish I had about monochrome image dithering

#61

Post by bane » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 9:39 PM UTC

It's so interesting to read about the rediscovery and reengagement with dithering by newer generations. I grew up when dithering was simply a fact of life because of the extremely limited graphics capabilities of early computers.

I love the reference to Obra Dinn as the graphics remind me of very fond feelings I had for the first black and white Macintoshes. There was something wonderful about the crisp 1-bit graphics, on a monitor designed for only those two colors, that made it look "better" than contemporary color displays in most respects -- almost higher resolution than it actually was. It's kind of almost impossible to replicate how it looked on modern color displays.

I didn't experience that feeling looking at an electronic display again until the Kindle. It also had the funny side-effect of making art assets on Macintoshes a fraction of the size as on color systems, making both the software smaller, and the hard-drives hold more.

There's also something somewhat unsatisfying about automatically generated dithering patterns used to recast color graphics into 1-bit b&w. It seems to really take an artist's hand to make it look beautiful. However, the author of this post ends up with some very nice examples and it's really well written.

If anybody is interested in seeing how the old systems looked, and some great uses of dithering throughout, I'd recommend checking out this amazing Internet Archive Mac in a Browser - https://archive.org/details/mac_MacOS_7.0.1_compilation

You get dithering literally at the system startup background.

Re: Ditherpunk: The article I wish I had about monochrome image dithering

#62

Post by mark-r » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 9:53 PM UTC

Tomte wrote: post #56

mark-r wrote: post #19

It was nice to see a mention of Robert Ulichney. His 1987 book "Digital Halftoning" covers most of the ground that this blog post does, plus more.

Donald Knuth also has two nice chapters in "Digital Typography".

I might have to look that up. It's hard for me to imagine what dithering and typography would have in common, other than they might both be used to produce a book.

Re: Ditherpunk: The article I wish I had about monochrome image dithering

#63

Post by ksm1717 » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 9:55 PM UTC

Here’s a cool rust crate that does color quantization and dithering at the same time. Ie picking the palette to use and dithering the picture with that palette as an evolving context. https://github.com/okaneco/rscolorq

It’s a port of an older c library that’s based on a paper/algorithm called spatial color quantization.

Re: Ditherpunk: The article I wish I had about monochrome image dithering

#64

Post by jVinc » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 9:58 PM UTC

I am in the same boat as the author of having only recently played Return of the Obra Dinn between Christmas and new years. I cannot recommend it enough, if you haven't played it and like puzzlers you should pick it up.

It's an extremely engaging story, and a narrative tool I have not previously encountered. No spoilers as this is revealed immediately, but essentially you are navigating past events through frozen timepoints at the moments when people died, and have to determine the identities and fates of all the about 60 crew aboard the boat, which requires a bit of puzzling things together across the different events that lead to peoples deaths.

I doubt we'll see a similar follow up game from Lucas Pope, as he has commented this game grew much larger than he expected and he would scale back for his next projects. Also from papers-please to Obra Dinn he seems to be one to break the mold at each iteration, but I really wish there where more games like this, with different stories to investigated.

Re: Ditherpunk: The article I wish I had about monochrome image dithering

#65

Post by Eric_WVGG » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 10:07 PM UTC

dassurma wrote: post #22

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #17

What an odd coincidence… I just acquired an "Inkplate" for my birthday (a recycled Kindle screen glued onto a board with an Arduino and wifi) and was in the process of looking for old 1bit art for it, stumbled across the term "ditherpunk" just last night. - https://inkplate.io artists: - https://unomoralez.com - https://www.instagram.com/mattisdovier/?hl=en - https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/dinaisth.html I'm going to st…

... I think I need to buy an Inkplate now

It’s fantastic. You can program in MicroPython, or C using Arduino IDE. I'm barely fluent in C and had no problem getting some basic stuff running last night.

Re: Ditherpunk: The article I wish I had about monochrome image dithering

#66

Post by dheera » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 10:11 PM UTC

jVinc wrote: post #64

I am in the same boat as the author of having only recently played Return of the Obra Dinn between Christmas and new years. I cannot recommend it enough, if you haven't played it and like puzzlers you should pick it up. It's an extremely engaging story, and a narrative tool I have not previously encountered. No spoilers as this is revealed immediately, but essentially you are navigating past events through frozen tim…

Not in the same boat as the author but in the past few weeks I've been getting into e-Ink displays and making gadgets and framed art with them, and most of the displays I can get a hold of are either 1-bit or 4-bit greyscale, so this is super relevant.

My "crude" dithering algorithm I wrote though seems not mentioned in the article. What I do is (in the case of 1-bit) just let the grey value (from 0.0=black to 1.0=white) determine the probability that the pixel is on or off, and render pseudorandom numbers according to those probabilities. In the case of 4-bit greyscale I do the same but within 16 bins.

I'm not sure how it compares to the methods in the article but maybe I can test this sometime.

Re: Ditherpunk: The article I wish I had about monochrome image dithering

#67

Post by the_af » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 10:12 PM UTC

jVinc wrote: post #64

I am in the same boat as the author of having only recently played Return of the Obra Dinn between Christmas and new years. I cannot recommend it enough, if you haven't played it and like puzzlers you should pick it up. It's an extremely engaging story, and a narrative tool I have not previously encountered. No spoilers as this is revealed immediately, but essentially you are navigating past events through frozen tim…

I share your love for Return of the Obra Dinn, truly a masterpiece and a game which shocked me out of my usual apathy towards recent videogames.

I have faith in Lucas Pope for whatever project he decides to tackle next. Two of his games are masterpieces, this one and Papers Please, and I also liked Helsing's Fire a lot. Whatever he does next, regardless of scope and theme, will surely please me.

Re: Ditherpunk: The article I wish I had about monochrome image dithering

#68

Post by ohazi » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 10:16 PM UTC

> As this image shows, the dithered gradient gets bright way too quickly.

sigh

Not in Firefox on Linux.

I vaguely recall seeing a multi-year-old bug related to subtly broken gamma behavior in either Firefox or Chrome, but can't seem to find it right now.

Re: Ditherpunk: The article I wish I had about monochrome image dithering

#69

Post by mrob » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 10:31 PM UTC

dheera wrote: post #66

jVinc wrote: post #64

I am in the same boat as the author of having only recently played Return of the Obra Dinn between Christmas and new years. I cannot recommend it enough, if you haven't played it and like puzzlers you should pick it up. It's an extremely engaging story, and a narrative tool I have not previously encountered. No spoilers as this is revealed immediately, but essentially you are navigating past events through frozen tim…

Not in the same boat as the author but in the past few weeks I've been getting into e-Ink displays and making gadgets and framed art with them, and most of the displays I can get a hold of are either 1-bit or 4-bit greyscale, so this is super relevant. My "crude" dithering algorithm I wrote though seems not mentioned in the article. What I do is (in the case of 1-bit) just let the grey value (from 0.0=black to 1.0=wh…

>(in the case of 1-bit) just let the grey value (from 0.0=black to 1.0=white) determine the probability that the pixel is on or off

This is equivalent to the random noise [-0.5; 0.5] before quantization example.

Re: Ditherpunk: The article I wish I had about monochrome image dithering

#70

Post by dheera » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 10:40 PM UTC

mrob wrote: post #69

dheera wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in the same boat as the author but in the past few weeks I've been getting into e-Ink displays and making gadgets and framed art with them, and most of the displays I can get a hold of are either 1-bit or 4-bit greyscale, so this is super relevant. My "crude" dithering algorithm I wrote though seems not mentioned in the article. What I do is (in the case of 1-bit) just let the grey value (from 0.0=black to 1.0=wh…

>(in the case of 1-bit) just let the grey value (from 0.0=black to 1.0=white) determine the probability that the pixel is on or off This is equivalent to the random noise [-0.5; 0.5] before quantization example.

I think you're right, very interesting, that means I can do a whole lot better in the visual quality I get out of these e-Ink displays.

Well damn, I'm excited I found this article! Thanks @dassurma!