Dithertime

Dithertime is a graphical desktop application for image dithering. It's fast, but more importantly it's more accurate, correct, and extensive than other image dithering software out there.

Why use image dithering?

Image dithering is a technique for emulating multiple colours with only a few colours. For example, a mix of black and white pixels will look gray from a distance.

Some reasons to use image dithering today:

• Aesthetics: dithering looks cool!
• Image size: dithered images are much smaller to store and serve
• Special screens: there are still modern screens don’t support tons of colours, like an e-ink screen, or the Playdate. Dithertime helps you generate images that look good on them.
• Retro-computing: there are tons of old screens that don’t support all the colours

Why use Dithertime?

Dithertime achieves mathematical and colour science correctness in ways that many existing dithering website and tools do not. This results in dithered images that are much more faithful reproductions of the original than other software creates.

It also supports a whole bunch of dithering algorithms and fun dithering matrices! For example:

• Random noise
• Ordered dithering
  • Bayer matrix, clustered dot (like old comic books!), vertical or horizontal lines
• Error diffusion
  • Simple 2D, Floyd-Steinberg, Jarvis-Judice-Ninke, Atkinson, Sierra, and more

Any image dithering settings you use in Dithertime can be recreated for free with a CLI or Go library, if you want to integrate these algorithms into a image processing pipeline.

Why pay me?

Having Dithertime be (initially) closed-source and paid is an experiment, following in the footsteps of Rad Reader by Alexander Cobleigh.

Dithertime will become open source under the AGPLv3 license after 375 purchases. These purchases will retroactively fund the roughly 75 hours spent on the development of Dithertime, at a rate of 50 CAD/hour.

Pay once, and you'll own it! Eventually, you'll have the rights to the source code too.

Your one-time payment includes future minor feature updates and bug fixes.

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Dithertime works on Linux, Windows, and macOS. Installation details are available in the README.txt file included in your download.

Dithertime is fully private: it does not perform analytics, tracking, or make external network connections of any kind. All images are solely processed on your device.

For more technical details on Dithertime, you can read my blog post.

Linux support details (click to expand)

• Ubuntu's latest LTS (24.04) is supported
• Ubuntu 22.04 is supported but you will need to install libwebkit2gtk-4.1-0
• Ubuntu 20.04 and earlier is not supported
• Arch Linux is supported
• Other Linux distros are expected to work as long as they have up to date packages, but are not officially supported or tested