Dithering a GIF

The GIF format can only store 256 colors per frame. Any photo, screen recording, or video you convert to GIF has to be squeezed down from millions of colors to that palette — and without dithering, smooth gradients (skies, skin tones, shadows) break into ugly, visible bands of flat color called color banding. Dithering is the fix: it scatters pixels from the limited palette so your eye blends them back into a gradient, at the cost of a bit of visible grain or texture.

Why GIFs need dithering more than other formats

Formats like PNG, WebP, and MP4 can represent millions of colors natively, so banding is rarely an issue. GIF's 256-color ceiling means it's almost always the format where dithering matters most — it's the difference between a GIF that looks like a cheap screenshot and one that looks intentional, whether that's a faithful color reproduction or a deliberately retro, grainy aesthetic.

Two reasons to dither a GIF

1. Quality — applying an error-diffusion algorithm like Floyd-Steinberg before or during GIF export keeps gradients looking smooth despite the 256-color limit, so photos and video frames don't get that washed-out, posterized look.

2. Style — a lot of creators dither GIFs on purpose, pairing an ordered/Bayer pattern with a low-color palette (black-and-white, 1-bit, or a retro console palette) to get a deliberately lo-fi, print-halftone, or 8-bit look for memes, album art, and social posts.

Dither a GIF in your browser

Open the Dither Dog workspace and drop in a GIF directly — it's processed frame by frame, fully client-side, so nothing is ever uploaded to a server. Pick from 28 dithering algorithms (Floyd-Steinberg for smooth photographic results, Bayer/ordered patterns for a more uniform retro texture) and 23 color palettes, adjust brightness and contrast live, and export straight back out as a GIF, WebM, or MP4.