So, uh, why do we need dithering?
I thought the era of 4 bit color had passed.
Why do we need dithering?
81–90 of 115 posts
Re: Why do we need dithering?
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".)
Interesting!
Re: Why do we need dithering?
#83Dithering is super useful in dark scenes in games and movies. By adding random noise to the screen it makes bands of color with harsh transitions imperceptible, and the dithering itself also isn't perceptible. I'm sure there are better approaches nowadays but in some of my game projects I've used the screen space dither approach used in Portal 2 that was detailed in this talk: https://media.steampowered.com/apps/valv…
It's not cheap for streaming. It's harder to compress and is lost in the process. The video codec is a smart low pass filter.
The AV1 codec has support to tell the decoder to generate fake film grain, so you can add back all the noise lost in compression.
Although I don't think it's very widely used, I dunno if that's due to the compressors or decompressors.
Re: Why do we need dithering?
#84Is zooming disabled for anyone else? The article depends on me looking at the photos, but they're the size of a MicroSD card on my screen, and zooming in is disabled on this site!
Re: Why do we need dithering?
#85Dithering is still very common in rendering pipelines. 8 bits per channel is not enough to capture subtle gradients, and you’ll get tons of banding. Particularly in mostly monochrome gradients produced by light sources. So you render everything to a floating point buffer and apply dithering. Unlike the examples in this post, this dithering is basically invisible at high resolutions, but it’s still very much in use.
A lot of display hardware uses a combination of spatial and temporal dithering these days. You can see it sometimes if you look up close, it appears as very faint flickering "snow" (the kind you'd see on old analog TV). Ironically, making this kind of dithering even less perceivable may turn out to be the foremost benefit of high pixel resolutions (beyond 1080p) and refresh rates (beyond 120Hz) since it seems that raising those specs is easier than directly improving color depth in hardware.
Re: Why do we need dithering?
#86You still see dithering from time to time as a cheap transparency, it's been a few years since Mario Odyssey but that's when last I recall it really stood out: https://xcancel.com/chriswade__/status/924071608976924673
mafia2 used that as well
(at least for cars appearing into your bubble)
Re: Why do we need dithering?
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
This also used to be a really common test image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna But its apparently a cropped centerfold from Playboy
The original Lenna is controversial, but I'm delighted to share the "ethically sourced Lenna": https://mortenhannemose.github.io/lena/
> The original Lenna is controversial, but I'm delighted to share the "ethically sourced Lenna": https://mortenhannemose.github.io/lena/
How is this ethically better than the original Lena - the model in that also one expressly approved the usage of the photo for the purposes it was being used for.
Re: Why do we need dithering?
#88You still see dithering from time to time as a cheap transparency, it's been a few years since Mario Odyssey but that's when last I recall it really stood out: https://xcancel.com/chriswade__/status/924071608976924673
mafia2 used that as well (at least for cars appearing into your bubble)
First time I saw it was in the original Unreal game (1998) when using the software renderer. It had this very distinct asymmetric dithering pattern.
Can't find a screenshot of it on short order, seems most screenshots are either of unrelated newer Unreal Engine or use hardware rendering which doesn't show this dithering.
Re: Why do we need dithering?
#89For some good examples, check out what people have achieved on the PlayDate handheld with dithering on its 1-bit screen.
Re: Why do we need dithering?
#90This 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 Wiki…
When teaching print (halftones, LPI, CMYK etc) I also use a parrot. I've used rainbows and chameleons too, but settled on the parrot as being the most appropriate. But now I begin to wonder if I was just parroting(har har) a paradigm.