LOW←TECH MAGAZINE

How Image Dithering Works

Added 2025-05-29 13:46:58 +0000 UTC

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) features Low-tech Magazine's solar powered website in its latest show: "Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film".

Our installation titled: Photograph of a beach that no longer exists focuses on the historical technique we use to compress our images: dithering. The images are converted to greyscale, shrunk, and then blown up in size again and dithered.

The installation was designed by Marie Otsuka, LTM's original web-designer. The dithering plugin was developped by Roel Roscam Abbing.

Read more about the installation on LACMA's blog: https://unframed.lacma.org/2025/04/21/cleaner-faster-greener-rethinking-how-we-build-websites

The image we use in the installation is the one that is on the power page of the solar website. When Marie Otsuka asked me to make a higher resolution image from the same spot, I had to disappoint her: the beach, north of Barcelona, is now two meters under water following a devastating storm in 2020.

You can find the exact dithering script here (open-source)

Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film is on view through July 13, 2025.