Image Dithering
Rebuild a photo from a handful of colours with the dither algorithm of your choice: error diffusion, ordered Bayer or noise, at any pixel size.
or browse filesdrop an image here or paste
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Rebuild a photo from a handful of colours with the dither algorithm of your choice: error diffusion, ordered Bayer or noise, at any pixel size.
or browse filesdrop an image here or paste
Dithering fakes the tones a small palette does not have by arranging the colours it does have in patterns - the newspaper photo, the Game Boy screen, the 1-bit Mac look. This ditherer works on any image in the browser with the algorithm as the thing you choose, in black and white or in color, so dithered images for pixel art, dither graphics and the dither filter look are all the same page. Pick a picture and it is rendered in black and white with Floyd-Steinberg at once; the Algorithm menu switches between the error-diffusion family - Floyd-Steinberg, Atkinson, Jarvis-Judice-Ninke, Stucki, Burkes, Sierra and Sierra Lite - the ordered Bayer patterns at 2, 4 and 8, a seeded noise threshold, and plain nearest colour with no dither at all. Palette sets the colours the picture is built from: 1-bit black and white, 4 or 16 greys, the four Game Boy greens, CGA in 4 or 16 colours, 3-bit RGB or four sepia tones. The download is the full-size image with every pixel one of those colours, and nothing is uploaded.
Pixel size makes the pattern itself chunky: the picture is averaged down by that factor, dithered, and blown back up in square blocks, so a 4 px setting gives the coarse retro dither of a low-resolution screen while the file stays the original size. Strength scales how much rounding error the diffusion passes on, or how far the ordered threshold swings; 100 is the textbook algorithm, lower values tame the pattern towards flat posterised areas, and 0 is the same as no dither. The stage info card names the algorithm and strength, the palette size and the block size in use. For an adaptive palette drawn from the photo's own colours, the image quantizer page does that job; this page is about fixed palettes and the patterns.
Download as PNG, which keeps every dithered pixel exactly - JPG would smear the pattern into new colours, so PNG is the default here - or WebP for a smaller file (slightly lossy, so check the pattern). The pencil next to the file name renames the download, the copy button puts the dithered picture on the clipboard, and on a phone the share button sends it to another app.
The picture is decoded in your browser, every algorithm runs on your own processor pixel by pixel, and the PNG is assembled on the device. Nothing is uploaded, no account is needed and no server keeps a copy.
Floyd-Steinberg is the standard and suits most photos. Atkinson pushes on less error, so it looks lighter and crisper, the classic early Macintosh look. Jarvis-Judice-Ninke and Stucki spread the error over more neighbours for a smoother grain; Burkes and Sierra sit between. Bayer ordered dither gives a regular crosshatch that stays put from frame to frame, which is why it is used for animation and pixel art; noise gives a grainy film-like texture.
A 1-bit image has two colours, black and white, one bit per pixel. Dithering is what makes a photo readable at 1 bit: the density of black dots stands in for grey. Choose the Black and white palette with any algorithm to get it; the download is a PNG whose pixels are all pure black or pure white.
Choose the Game Boy palette for the four greens of the original handheld, or CGA for the black, cyan, magenta and white of early PC graphics, then raise Pixel size to 2 to 4 so the dither pattern is as coarse as those screens were. Bayer 4 by 4 with a Game Boy palette comes close to how the console's games looked.
No. The image stays in your browser from the moment you pick it to the moment you save the dithered PNG. Nothing is transferred, stored or seen by anyone else.