Image Dithering

Want the genuine look of a 1-bit Mac screen, an original Game Boy sprite, or a halftone newspaper print — without a fake Instagram-style filter slapped on top? This tool runs the actual dithering algorithms that produced those looks in the first place, directly on your photo.

Floyd-Steinberg is the classic error-diffusion algorithm: each pixel is quantized to the nearest available palette color, and the rounding error is pushed forward into not-yet-processed neighbors using the textbook weights — 7/16 to the pixel on the right, 3/16 below-left, 5/16 below, and 1/16 below-right. Atkinson, Apple's algorithm from the original Macintosh, distributes error to six neighbors but only propagates 6/8 of it, discarding the rest — which is exactly why Atkinson output looks lighter and punchier than Floyd-Steinberg's smoother gradients. Bayer ordered dithering is structurally different from both: there is no error diffusion whatsoever, just a fixed 4x4 threshold matrix compared against each pixel's brightness, which is what produces its distinctive crosshatch texture instead of organic-looking noise.

Three palettes are available: 1-bit black and white for a true two-tone look, a 4-shade grayscale palette in the spirit of the original Game Boy screen, and a reduced-RGB mode that quantizes each color channel to 2 levels independently, giving 8 reachable colors for a chunky retro-color effect. Every algorithm processes real pixel data left-to-right, top-to-bottom in a floating-point working buffer, exactly like the original published algorithms, so the sub-integer rounding error is honestly preserved between steps.

Upload a photo, pick an algorithm and a palette, and press Execute to see a before/after comparison right on the page. Download the dithered result as a PNG at the original resolution — nothing is uploaded anywhere, the whole conversion happens on your device.