How My Images Are Dithered

That distinction drove most of the useful commentary. People with print experience said the visual target is real, but the exact artifact pattern depends heavily on the output process. Offset printing exposes the classic dot structures and moiré problems people associate with halftones. Rotogravure blends more smoothly because the mechanics are different. Several readers also pushed on terminology. Calling this "dithering" is not wrong in a broad sense, but what the post actually shows is mostly halftoning, which matters if you are searching for the right tools or trying to reason about artifacts. The other strong thread was about where dithering is genuinely functional rather than decorative. Commenters drew a clean line between aesthetic halftoning for web images and dithering used to prevent banding when reducing bit depth or targeting constrained displays and printers. At 8 bits per color channel, smooth gradients can visibly step. Adding controlled noise can hide that, especially in print and on higher-dynamic-range displays. But that is a different job from simulating ink dots. On compression, the consensus was blunt: if your goal is small photographic files, modern formats like JPEG and WebP beat palette reduction and dither tricks. Dithering often makes lossy compression worse because it adds high-frequency detail, and even with PNG the result can go either way depending on how much flat color you destroyed. The practical read is simple. Use dithering and halftoning because you want the look or because you need to mask quantization artifacts on limited outputs, not because you expect a magic size win.