Sierra dithering online

About Sierra dithering

Frankie Sierra designed a family of dithering kernels in 1989. The full three-row Sierra filter spreads error to ten neighbours and produces results very close to Jarvis–Judice–Ninke with slightly less computation.

Its texture is organic and noise-like rather than patterned — a nice middle ground if Floyd–Steinberg looks too wormy and Jarvis too soft.

Diffusion kernel

          *   5   3
  2   4   5   4   2
      2   3   2       (÷32)

“*” marks the current pixel; numbers show how much of its quantization error each neighbour receives.

Best for

• Natural, film-grain texture
• Landscapes
• Portraits

How to dither an image

1. Add your image. Click Upload image, drag a file onto the preview, or paste with Ctrl/⌘+V. JPG, PNG, WebP and GIF work.
2. Pick an algorithm and palette. Error diffusion (Floyd–Steinberg, Atkinson…) for photos, Bayer for a retro crosshatch.
3. Tune it. Raise pixel size for chunkier pixels; adjust brightness and contrast to control which tones become dark or light.
4. Download. Export a lossless PNG at up to 8× with crisp nearest-neighbour scaling.

FAQ