Retro photo
converters

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Five converters for turning and photo into the look of classic 80s and 90s technology. CRT television, Commodore 64 / CBM 64, halftone newspaper, dot matrix printer and low ink cartridge print. All processing locally in your browser using the Canvas API.

Dithering, patterns of pixels to create an optical illusion

Dithering is central for low-resolution

Dithering is how to reproduce continuous-tone photographs with few colours and low resolution, like a colourful sunset using only a handful of colours, or pure black and white. Dithering is the arrangement of pixels in patterns to fool the eye into seeing shades that the display, or printer, cannot actually produce. Viewed from reading distance, the brain averages nearby dots together and perceives a smooth gradient.

The basic approach "if the pixel is darker than 128, print a black dot; otherwise leave it blank" gives a harsh cut with no grey at all. That is what the None (Threshold) mode does. Dithering distributes the rounding error from each pixel to its neighbours, so the overall average brightness stays correct across the image.

The four algorithms differ in how they spread the error

Floyd-Steinberg

Smooth · organic · best tonal range

When a pixel is rounded (say a 90-brightness pixel becomes white), the error (90 − 255 = −165) is pushed to the right neighbour and the row below in fixed proportions (7⁄16, 3⁄16, 5⁄16, 1⁄16). Those neighbours "remember" they owe darkness and are more likely to become black. The result is organic, flowing dot patterns that follow image contours. Best overall quality.

Atkinson

Crisp · slightly light · great for portraits

Similar to Floyd-Steinberg but only propagates ¾ of the error, the remainder is discarded. Bright highlights stay very clean and white, but deep shadows can lose detail. Looks slightly lighter and crisper than Floyd-Steinberg. Developed at Apple for the original Macintosh.

Bayer 4×4

Regular crosshatch · retro grid look

No error diffusion. Each pixel is compared against a fixed 4×4 grid of threshold values that repeats across the whole image, producing a regular geometric dot pattern. A visible crosshatch texture that looks mechanical and "printed". The most authentically computer-era result; closest to what the C64 and early printers actually used.

None (Threshold)

Hard cut · no grey · high-contrast graphic

Pure cutoff. Below the threshold value = black dot; above = nothing. Produces harsh, posterised output with no grey at all. Only useful for high-contrast graphic effects or when you want the maximum "stencil" look. In colour mode the same binary logic applies per ink channel.

In colour mode the same principle applies but per ink channel, pixels with low colour saturation receive fewer coloured dots, highly saturated pixels receive more, and the chosen dithering algorithm decides which individual pixels get a dot to hit the right average coverage.