Error diffusion

Floyd–Steinberg dithering online

The standard error diffusion from 1976. Each pixel is rounded to ink or paper and the rounding error is passed to four neighbours not yet visited, so small patches keep the right average tone.

Good for photos on screen and GIFs.

Try Floyd–Steinberg on your image → How Floyd–Steinberg dithering works

How it decides

      #  7
   3  5  1      ÷ 16

Fine and accurate at screen resolution. In a 1 mm pen dot or a laser burn, its worms and its regular patches at 1/2, 1/3 and 1/4 grey can show.

Floyd–Steinberg dithering applied to a photo of a lion — Slide to compare. A 0.7 mm cell on A5 with perceptual tone: 28,592 marks. Photo: Lion, Andreas Vonlanthen, 2025, Unsplash License.

Slide to compare. A 0.7 mm cell on A5 with perceptual tone: 28,592 marks. Photo: Lion, Andreas Vonlanthen, 2025, Unsplash License.

Try it live

This runs in your browser. Change the algorithm, the number of cells or the threshold, or put a second algorithm next to it.

Floyd–Steinberg

Algorithm Compare with Cells across 96 Threshold 0.50 Serpentine scan Tone

Rendered in 0.0 ms on your machine. Every dot here is what a pen or laser would put down.

All algorithms

Every one is an option in the Dither style: dither an image online and export a 1-bit PNG for a laser or SVG dots for a plotter.