Group items tagged

HyperDither is an OS X image processing utility that converts color or grayscale images to 1 bit black & white using a sophisticated dithering routine. Way back in the early days of Macintosh, Bill Atkinson (of HyperCard, QuickDraw, MacPaint & nature photography fame) developed a very elegant dithering filter to convert greyscale image data to the 1 bit black & white Mac video display. The dithering produced by this routine was much higher quality than the now-a-days ubiquitous Floyd-Steinberg or "Error-diffusion" filter (used by QuickTime, PhotoShop).

The dither matrix was implemented an option in Apple's HyperScan software (A HyperCard stack with some XCMDs/XFCNs) that would connect to a flatbed scanner. HyperScan, and hence the most-excellent Atkinson dithering routine, has been unavailable for many, many years-but not forgotten! I was able to email Bill Atkinson in January, 2003 and inquire about the details of the algorithm; he was kind enough to respond with a brief write up of the routine-15 minutes later I had it up and running.
It's taken a few spare afternoons since 2003 to pack everything into a nice little application with documentation and an icon-better late than never!

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is developed by artists and designers as an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.