Notes on life, art, photography and technology, by a Danish dropout bohemian.
When you drink the water, remember the river.
Monday, August 25, 2008
Hyperdither
Just found a fun little app, Hyperdither. You can do something similar in Photoshop, but this app gives a better result, and faster. The dithering routine was written by Bill Atkinson for the first Mac.
2 comments:
Anonymous
said...
I don't know what is supposed to make this better than Floyd-Steinberg. It would appear to me that the pattern is more clearly visible in Atkinson than in F-S. I guess the preference depends on the source image, and is ultimately a matter of taste...
But if you are going to write a dedicated WIMP app* just to do grayscale dithering, why not support all the common half-toning algorithms and make it user selectable? Things like F-S are just a few lines of code.
*) A silly idea to begin with. What if you need to process thousands of images? Or you need to process images created on the fly as part of a web service?
As to the right way to do this, look at pamditherbw. It supports all common half-toning methods, including Atkinson.
On Atkinson the pattern is more pronounced, but it may have a more pleasing, less digital "bokeh" to it. :-) So I guess the Atkinson algorithm has a right to exist.
2 comments:
I don't know what is supposed to make this better than Floyd-Steinberg. It would appear to me that the pattern is more clearly visible in Atkinson than in F-S. I guess the preference depends on the source image, and is ultimately a matter of taste...
But if you are going to write a dedicated WIMP app* just to do grayscale dithering, why not support all the common half-toning algorithms and make it user selectable? Things like F-S are just a few lines of code.
*) A silly idea to begin with. What if you need to process thousands of images? Or you need to process images created on the fly as part of a web service?
As to the right way to do this, look at pamditherbw. It supports all common half-toning methods, including Atkinson.
Ok, here is a visual comparison of Floyd-Steinberg and Atkinson.
On Atkinson the pattern is more pronounced, but it may have a more pleasing, less digital "bokeh" to it. :-) So I guess the Atkinson algorithm has a right to exist.
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