Explain your aesthetic
Posted: Sun Nov 16, 2025 5:01 pm
This is for anyone who has an aesthetic on their profile that might need some explanation... or to just ramble about how much you like it.
For me, "Bayer Dithering" is just something that I use a lot in my personal art. For example, here's a little fan video I made for S.T.A.L.K.E.R:
And a drawing I did of my friend:
You see those pixels dotted across everything? That's called "dithering," and there's different methods of it. Essentially, dithering adds noise to an image in such a way that smooths everything out when the number of colors is reduced.
If you look at these three images, you'll see that the one on the left has a full color spectrum, while the two on the right have had their palettes restricted to 16 colors. The middle image looks a bit chunky though, and the demarcation between colors is kind of distracting. To smooth things out, the image on the right has dithering applied to make the image more clean.
You'll remember that I mentioned different methods of dithering, with my chosen aesthetic being Bayer dithering. The example of the cat above was through a method called "Floyd-Steinberg Dithering," the most common kind that you'll probably run into the most. If you've ever seen a gif with any dithering on it, odds are that this is the method used.
But there's also another form of dithering mostly known as "Ordered Dithering..." and this is the Bayer Dithering that I like the most.
Bayer dithering is usually used on two-bit color palettes, and it's here that you can see the iconic, grid-like pattern that it establishes. It makes images look "video gamey," and when used in image editing it can actually hide a lot of flaws. There's not much color correction you need to do in order to hide the fact that you're putting one image into a mismatched environment. And, of course, it just has a pleasant look to it. It's a lot of fun to use in image and video editing, and while I don't actually think it's the best-looking aesthetic out there, I work with it all the time to the point where I'd consider it a signature of sorts.
For me, "Bayer Dithering" is just something that I use a lot in my personal art. For example, here's a little fan video I made for S.T.A.L.K.E.R:
And a drawing I did of my friend:
You see those pixels dotted across everything? That's called "dithering," and there's different methods of it. Essentially, dithering adds noise to an image in such a way that smooths everything out when the number of colors is reduced.
If you look at these three images, you'll see that the one on the left has a full color spectrum, while the two on the right have had their palettes restricted to 16 colors. The middle image looks a bit chunky though, and the demarcation between colors is kind of distracting. To smooth things out, the image on the right has dithering applied to make the image more clean.
You'll remember that I mentioned different methods of dithering, with my chosen aesthetic being Bayer dithering. The example of the cat above was through a method called "Floyd-Steinberg Dithering," the most common kind that you'll probably run into the most. If you've ever seen a gif with any dithering on it, odds are that this is the method used.
But there's also another form of dithering mostly known as "Ordered Dithering..." and this is the Bayer Dithering that I like the most.
Bayer dithering is usually used on two-bit color palettes, and it's here that you can see the iconic, grid-like pattern that it establishes. It makes images look "video gamey," and when used in image editing it can actually hide a lot of flaws. There's not much color correction you need to do in order to hide the fact that you're putting one image into a mismatched environment. And, of course, it just has a pleasant look to it. It's a lot of fun to use in image and video editing, and while I don't actually think it's the best-looking aesthetic out there, I work with it all the time to the point where I'd consider it a signature of sorts.