#either for fun and/or to greatly reduce the artwork's file size

[pinkbat5]

Hello! 8D

Apologies if this is a random question, but it is corru.observer art related and I believe that you would be the best person to ask for such. Please let me know if that is not the case!

So, the question: How do you do the dithering (Floyd-Steinberg, if this wiki page is correct) effect that I've seen in much of corru's art? I see that, from your neocities, that you use firealpaca (and procreate, though I lack access to that program), so I am wondering if it is possible to do in that program, and if so, how it is done (and if it can be done in other programs, such as Krita).

Many thanks in advance!

Good news, I'm one of the right people!! Though @corruworks uses different methods than I (IIRC paint.net is one of them?) so it's worth asking them too-- I haven't personally asked them recently, I just kinda leave PNGs at their door and run away

Unfortunately you can't dither in firealpaca or procreate directly as far as I can tell. Instead I export the art from firealpaca/procreate and use imagemagick for all my dithering needs! It's command-line only so it's slightly less intuitive to use, but it's pretty powerful.. I eyeball how something will look when dithered, actually dither it, then adjust contrast and re-dither a few times until it looks good to me. There are probably better ways to do this but it would require I use a program other than firealpaca, which I don't wanna do!!

The command I use looks like this:

magick input.png -dither floydsteinberg -remap palette.png output.png

input.png being my base image (including a full path leading to it), output.png is the name of the resulting dithered image, and palette.png is a very small image file that contains at least one pixel of every color that you want to be in the final image. The one I use for a full CMYK palette looks like this:

Note that it includes a single transparent pixel to allow for transparency. If you want to only dither with white, black, cyan and magenta like how most obesk things are colored, just delete the yellow pixel!

Imagemagick is a batch image editor so you can just. Dither a ton of images at the same time. It's neat and highly I recommend giving it a go!

If it's too big of a pain to use though, there is also this tool made by cyclar2 and other online dithering tools out there.