Yeah this is important when you print images, since printers can reveal banding artifacts you can’t see on a monitor. I learned this the expensive way printing a batch of large format images that had gradients in them, without dithering. This is also how I learned one way that Photoshop was for professionals and GIMP & ImageMagick weren’t; At the time (and this was years ago, to be fair), Photoshop dithered by default when going from 16 to 8 bits, while those popular open source tools did not and also did not even have good ways to do it manually by adding the right amount of noise before changing the bit depth. I don’t know what the open source tools do today, maybe they’ve fixed it, I haven’t checked.

The counterpoint is that you should just keep your images at 10 bit minimum or 12+ bit until the OS/monitor can dither for you. Lossy compression will do much better with a 10/12 bit image than a dithered 8 bit one.

I'm only vaguely familiar with dithering/half-toning. What does "component" refer to here?

I’d say halftoning is a specific type of dithering. Wikipedia mentions that for print, some people consider the terms synonymous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither#Applications

See also,

Surface-stable fractal dithering:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzjWBmhO_1E

And the technical deep dive:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPqGaIMVuLs

>Is this even dithering?

>But if you care about the method this is not dithering.

> I looked it up, the translation in this case is, in fact, simply "half tones" :^)

Dither loses information, so perfectly reversible might be an unreasonable goal. But I bet you could train or fine-tune a denoiser to do a really good job. This might make a cool paper, if there’s anything at all non-standard or surprising you discover along the way.

No, although AI gets really close. Dithering represents adding noise to an image and also represents doing a lossy type of compression.

It's a somewhat active inverse problems research subfield https://github.com/MenghanXia/ReversibleHalftoning

Do you want to undither, or un-half-tone, like the images in TFA?

Unhalftoning is called descreening.

I use this:

https://descreen.net/

It's an aesthetic choice. What counters taste?

That only says to not expect compression from dither, it’s not a counterpoint to using dither for any other reason.

Perhaps because inference on dithered images is pretty rare, not a common or popular thing to do? Otherwise, people would train on dithered images. NNs are trained on noisy images. Training with dither would not learn any other invariants besides how to see through dither, it doesn’t automatically generalize to anything else.

When someone says AI can't do something, I like to try it:

> This image features a close-up abstract scene styled with a classic halftone (Ben-Day dot) pop-art filter ...

https://share.gemini.google/O5eqZOKxwzw3

> This image is a halftone/thermal print styled photograph. The photo features a group of four people posing closely together indoors or in front of a windowed backdrop:

https://share.gemini.google/KJOxBDXYsFT4

I’m sorry, but I can’t understand what you’re saying at all. Explain?