Dithering
Faking shades and gradients with patterns of tiny dots from a limited palette. The retro 'old computer graphics' look.
See it
What it is
Dithering approximates colors a limited palette can't show by scattering pixels of available colors in patterns your eye blends together. Born of necessity on early hardware, it's now a deliberate aesthetic: 1-bit zines, retro game art, and grainy hero images.
Common flavors: ordered/Bayer (crosshatch-like grid pattern), Floyd-Steinberg (organic error-diffusion grain), and halftone (the newspaper-dot cousin). On the web it's done with shaders, canvas filters, or pre-processed images.
Gotcha: compression hates dithering. Fine pixel patterns bloat PNGs and smear in lossy formats, so export with care.
Ask AI for it
Apply an ordered (Bayer matrix) dithering effect to this image/section: reduce it to a limited palette (2 to 4 colors) and simulate the in-between shades with a pixel-level threshold pattern, like retro 1-bit Mac graphics. Keep the pixels crisp, with no blur or smoothing on the dither pattern.