Why do we need dithering?
typefully.com
Why do we need dithering?
1–10 of 115 posts
Re: Why do we need dithering?
#2They answered the question in the first two sentences: We don't need it, it's just an aesthetic nowadays.
Re: Why do we need dithering?
#3They answered the question in the first two sentences: We don't need it, it's just an aesthetic nowadays.
It's not just aesthetic, I keep seeing games with color banding because they don't bother to dither before quantizing.
Re: Why do we need dithering?
#4This is the best explanation I’ve come across. I enjoy dithering as a playful way to compress file size when it makes sense.
Re: Why do we need dithering?
#5Slightly frustrating the author started out with color images and then switched to grayscale.
Re: Why do we need dithering?
#6They answered the question in the first two sentences: We don't need it, it's just an aesthetic nowadays.
Dithering can be for aesthetic reasons, I presume especially old-school dithering that is especially pronounced. However, dithering is actually still useful in all sorts of signal processing, particularly when there are perceptible artifacts of quantization. This occurs all the time: you can trivially observe it by making gradients that go between close looking colors, something you can see on the web right now. There are many techniques to avoid banding like this, but dithering lets you hide banding without needing increased bit depth or choosing strategic stop colors by trading off spatial resolution for (perceived) color resolution, which works excellently for gradients because it's all low frequency.
And frankly, it turns out 256 colors is quite a lot of colors especially for a small image, so with a very good quantization algorithm and a very good dithering algorithm, you can seriously crunch a lot of things down to PNG8 with no obvious loss in quality. I have done this at many of my employers, armed with other tricks, to dramatically reduce page load sizes.
Re: Why do we need dithering?
#7They answered the question in the first two sentences: We don't need it, it's just an aesthetic nowadays.
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.
Re: Why do we need dithering?
#8Earlier 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.
Yeah, the article is wrong about that.
Re: Why do we need dithering?
#9Earlier 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.
You can do with a static dither pattern (I've done it, and it works well). It's a bit of a trade-off between banding and noise, but at least static stuff stays static and thus easily compressable.
Re: Why do we need dithering?
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yeah, the article is wrong about that.
It would be nice if you had some examples.