My Images Are Dithered

Summary

I don't know much about dithering. But when I visit other people's sites and they dither their images in cool ways I always wonder how they do it. So in case anyone is wondering, here's my current method for dithering these pink images. Edit: Almost like I know myself too well — the pictures now look like this instead: Which is covered in the post. Dithering, beside making a picture look (to put it professionally) cool as fuck, can also reduce file size (by using less colors while maintaining details) and thus needed storage (if using only the reduced images) and the weight of your website for the client. That's why sites like Low Tech Magazine use it, for example. The idea of pink images came from a post a while back, when I tried this before. The post Designing without color introduces the idea of the current design, where I try to get a sort of black and white "printed" vibe, using color only for emphasis. (This makes sense only when you are a light mode user like me). The image back then, with the old method, looked like this: The key difference here being that I limited the picture's palette to true monochrome: black and this pink. Also, the weird "dithered" dots are much bigger. So what's this My goal was to immitate a printed image. While individual pixels on a screen may have the luxury of setting variable values of red, green and blue — making the grid of repeating RGB lights on your screen light up with different intensity — things work a little differently on paper (and other print substrates). Getting the limited palette of colors your printer is working with to give the illusion of more colors requires using a grid/matrix of dots. You can go about this in three different ways: AM, FM and hybrid grids. The amplitude here being the size of the dot and the frequency, well … the frequency. Making a dark spot with AM grids means big dots, in FM grids it's lotsa dots. The top shows an FM print: the dots look chaotic.The bottom shows AM: all dots show up in a ...