[HN Gopher] Why do we need dithering?
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Why do we need dithering?
Author : ibobev
Score : 17 points
Date : 2025-11-04 19:27 UTC (9 days ago)
(HTM) web link (typefully.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (typefully.com)
| abstractspoon wrote:
| They answered the question in the first two sentences: We don't
| need it, it's just an aesthetic nowadays.
| debugnik wrote:
| It's not just aesthetic, I keep seeing games with color banding
| because they don't bother to dither before quantizing.
| amelius wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Yeah, the article is wrong about that.
| amelius wrote:
| It would be nice if you had some examples.
| nofriend wrote:
| see eg
| https://xcancel.com/theo/status/1978161273214058786?s=46
| slabity wrote:
| 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".
| Sesse__ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Slightly frustrating the author started out with color images and
| then switched to grayscale.
| raajg wrote:
| 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...
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