Explainer
What Is Dithering? A Plain-English Explanation
Dithering is how a few colours pretend to be many. Here's what it actually does, why it exists, and where you still see it today.
Updated 2026-06-02
Dithering is a trick for showing more colours or shades than you actually have. Instead of a smooth grey, you scatter black and white pixels so that, from a step back, your eye blends them into grey. That's the whole idea. Everything else is detail.
The problem dithering solves
Imagine you can only print pure black or leave the paper white. No grey ink. How do you show a soft shadow? You can't paint it grey, so you break it into tiny black dots with white gaps between them. Dense dots read as dark, sparse dots read as light. The page never holds a single grey pixel, but your eye sees a gradient anyway.
Old computers had the same problem with colour. A screen limited to 256 colours couldn't show a real photo, so it scattered the colours it did have to fake the ones it didn't. That grainy, speckled look in early GIFs and game art? That's dithering doing its job.
The two families of dithering
Error diffusion
Error-diffusion methods go pixel by pixel. Each pixel gets rounded to the nearest available colour, and the leftover difference — the error — gets pushed onto the neighbouring pixels that haven't been processed yet. Floyd–Steinberg is the famous one. The result looks organic and photographic, with no obvious repeating pattern.
Ordered dithering
Ordered dithering compares each pixel against a fixed grid of threshold values, usually a Bayer matrix. Because the grid repeats, the pattern is regular and predictable. It looks more mechanical, which is exactly what you want for comics, posters, and anything that needs to stay stable across video frames.
Dithering vs halftone — are they the same?
They're cousins. Halftone specifically uses dots of varying size to fake tone, the way a newspaper does. Dithering is the broader idea of arranging a limited palette to fake colours and shades. In practice they overlap, and a good halftone tool lets you combine both: a dot grid for structure, a dither algorithm for how the tones break up.
Where you still see it
- Newspapers and comic books, the original use case.
- Retro and pixel-art games, where the grain is part of the style.
- Risograph and screen prints, which can only lay down a few flat inks.
- Album covers, posters, and zines that want a printed, analogue feel.
Frequently asked questions
- What does dithering mean?
- Dithering means arranging a small set of colours or shades in a pattern so that, viewed from a distance, they blend into colours the device can't actually produce. It's how a black-and-white image can appear to have grey tones.
- Is dithering still used today?
- Yes. It's used in printing, retro and pixel-art aesthetics, risograph and screen printing, and any situation with a limited colour palette. It's also a deliberate design choice for an analogue, printed look.
- What's the difference between dithering and halftone?
- Halftone uses dots of varying size to simulate tone, like newsprint. Dithering is the broader technique of arranging a limited palette to simulate more colours or shades. The two are often combined.