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It's not just aesthetic, I keep seeing games with color banding because they don't bother to dither before quantizing.
by debugnik 11mo ago
It's not just aesthetic, I keep seeing games with color banding because they don't bother to dither before quantizing.
- amelius 11mo agoFrom the article: > We don't really need dithering anymore because we have high bit-depth colors so its largely just a retro aesthetic now. By the way, dithering in video creates additional problems because you want some kind of stability between successive frames.
- dTal 11mo agoYeah, the article is wrong about that.
- amelius 11mo agoIt would be nice if you had some examples.
- nofriend 11mo agosee eg https://xcancel.com/theo/status/1978161273214058786?s=46 https://xcancel.com/theo/status/1978161273214058786?s=46
- slabity 11mo agoAcerola recently made a video about how Silk Song has banding with dark colors due to poor dithering (and how to fix it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=au9pce-xg5s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=au9pce-xg5s Highly recommend for any graphics programmer that might think dithering is unnecessary or simply a "aesthetic choice".
- knollimar 11mo agoTo lend more credibility, the devs added more dithering in the next patch.
- dTal 11mo agoA great many can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither (also a very nice explanation of why dithering is a fundamental signal processing step applicable to many fields, not just an "aesthetic".)
- amelius 11mo agoInteresting!
- Dylan16807 11mo agoThe average desktop computer is running with 8 bit color depth the vast majority of the time, so find or generate basically any wide basic gradient and you'll see it.
- doormatt 11mo agoI think you mean 24 bit. 8 bit would only be 256 colors total.
- recursive 11mo ago8 bits for each of R G and B. So a grey-scale gradient indeed has only 256 colors available. Any gradient also will have about that many at most.
- kragen 11mo agoIn most gradients, the transitions in R, G, and B are at different places.
- recursive 11mo agoTrue. Also, in most gradients, the full range of R G and B is not used. In rgb(50, 60, 70) to rgb(150, 130, 120), there are only 200 total transitions.
- kragen 11mo agoTrue!
- mrandish 11mo agoIn terms of color spaces, SRGB (the typical baseline default RGB of desktop computing) is quite naive and inefficient. Pretty much its only upsides are its conceptual and mathematical simplicity. There are much more efficient color spaces which use dynamic non-linear curves and are based on how the rods and cones in human eyes sense color. The current hotness for wide color gamuts and High Dynamic Range is ICTCP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICtCp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICtCp) which is conceptually similar to (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LMS_color_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LMS_color_space).
- electroly 11mo agoA very simple black-to-white gradient can only be, at most, 256 pixels wide before it starts banding on the majority of computers that use SDR displays. HDR only gives you a couple extra bits where each bit doubles how wide the gradient can be before it starts running out of unique color values. If the two color endpoints of the gradient are closer together, you get banding sooner. Dithering completely solves gradient banding.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- Sesse__ 11mo agoYou can do with a static dither pattern (I've done it, and it works well). It's a bit of a trade-off between banding and noise, but at least static stuff stays static and thus easily compressable.
- TinkersW 11mo agoThe article is simple wrong, dithering is still widely used, and no we do not have enough color depth to avoid it. Go render a blue sky gradient without dithering, you will see obvious bands.
- mrandish 11mo agoYep, even high quality 24-bit uncompressed imagery often benefits from dithering, especially if it's synthetically generated and, even if it's natural imagery, if it's processed or manipulated - even mildly - it'll probably benefit from dithering. If it's a digital photograph, it was probably already dithered during the de-bayering process.