Why do we need dithering?

https://typefully.com/DanHollick/why-do-we-need-dithering-Ut7oD4k

25•ibobev•1w ago

Comments

abstractspoon•1w ago

They answered the question in the first two sentences: We don't need it, it's just an aesthetic nowadays.

debugnik•1h ago

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

amelius•1h ago

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.

dTal•1h ago

Yeah, the article is wrong about that.

amelius•1h ago

It would be nice if you had some examples.

nofriend•1h ago

see eg https://xcancel.com/theo/status/1978161273214058786?s=46

slabity•57m ago

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".

dTal•50m ago

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".)

Dylan16807•13m ago

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.

electroly•10m ago

A very simple black-to-white gradient can only be, at most, 256 pixels wide before it starts banding on the majority of computers that use SDR displays. HDR only gives you a couple extra bits where each bit doubles how wide the gradient can be before it starts running out of unique color values. If the two color endpoints of the gradient are closer together, you get banding sooner. Dithering completely solves gradient banding.

Sesse__•1h ago

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.

TinkersW•58m ago

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.

jchw•1h ago

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.

tinkelenberg•1h ago

This is the best explanation I’ve come across. I enjoy dithering as a playful way to compress file size when it makes sense.

dcrazy•1h ago

Slightly frustrating the author started out with color images and then switched to grayscale.

raajg•1h ago

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...

susam•56m ago

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.

andai•49m ago

Also by the author: https://www.makingsoftware.com/

Recent discussions:

Making Software - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43678144

How does a screen work? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44550572

What is a color space? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45013154

01HNNWZ0MV43FF•20m ago

Playdead Games did a really nice presentation about dithering for games, it gets passed around and I'm sure it's been on HN already: https://loopit.dk/banding_in_games.pdf

Dylan16807•15m ago

> Before we all mute the word 'dithering'

Is this a reply to something?

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Zed is our office

OpenMANET Wi-Fi HaLow open-source project for Raspberry Pi–based MANET radios

Launch HN: Tweeks (YC W25) – Browser extension to deshittify the web

Checkout.com hacked, refuses ransom payment, donates to security labs

650GB of Data (Delta Lake on S3). Polars vs. DuckDB vs. Daft vs. Spark

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Denx (a.k.a. U-Boot) Retires

IBM Patented Euler's 200 Year Old Math Technique for 'AI Interpretability'

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Android developer verification: Early access starts

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Why do we need dithering?

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