self link: image processing silliness - from 9056 KiB to 32 KiB: a dithering rabbithole

[packbat]

For reasons, we wanted to play with color quantization and dithering, and we found out about command line tool ImageMagick's color quantization/dither tools. Then we came up with a very silly idea: what if we took a given starting image and, using our limited knowledge of dither algorithms and complete lack of knowledge of image size optimization, tried to make the coolest versions we could under 32 KiB? Setting the limit to be filesize and not raster resolution means that every algorithm is going to create some compromise between size and detail … so maybe Floyd-Steinberg produces a clearer result at the same resolution, but how much smaller does it have to be to fit in the size limit?

"image processing silliness – from 9056 KiB to 32 KiB: a dithering rabbithole explored by the Packbats, Jan 2024"

We finally finished this freaking project, and it's such a big one that it's too big for a Dreamwidth post - click through to check it out.