I was wondering how to intentionally limit my colour palette in Krita so I can draw pixel art like they did in the 90's, and when I need to create more colours (or the illusion of them) that's where ordered dithering comes in

Like this:



And like the left hand example, when Windows 95 was limited to 16 colours but more were created with ordered dithering:



The "Common Workflows" tutorial wasn't helpful and was pretty vague.

If you want to limit your colour palette then you can use one of the standard colour palettes such as PixelArt 16 or PixelArt 32, available in the Palettes docker. You can make your own custom palette if you really want to or download them from somewhere.

If you have too many colours to start with then Filter -> Artistic -> Posterise may be of use to you.

If you want only one dither pattern:
New Filter Mask -> Map -> Palettize -> Dither

However, the example you show has many patterns, namely every second of the following ones:


To achieve something like that, possible solutions are:

1. We should make a feature request for dithering with several patterns.

2. Write a Krita script or plugin that calls an external program that performs dithering. Here's a draft that works okay, you should install ImageMagick (you can play with its settings in the code below), rename a layer to "fordither" and create the directory "C:\tmp\" and then run the following script in the Krita Scripter:

Code: Select all

from krita import *
import subprocess
import os

ki = Krita.instance()
doc = ki.activeDocument()

filename_fordither = 'C:\\tmp\\fordither.png'
filename_dithered = 'C:\\tmp\\dithered.png'

LAYERNAME_FORDITHER = "fordither"
node = doc.nodeByName(LAYERNAME_FORDITHER)

if node is None:
    print('Please rename a layer to "'+LAYERNAME_FORDITHER+'".')

else:
    # save image to file
    exportConfiguration = InfoObject() # no arguments means default
    #doc.exportImage(filename_fordither, exportConfiguration)
    node.save(filename_fordither, 1, 1, exportConfiguration)

    # apply ImageMagick dithering
    #subprocess.run("")
    os.system("magick convert "+filename_fordither+" -ordered-dither o8x8,6 "+filename_dithered)

    # create File Layer from dithered file
    LAYERNAME_DITHERED = "dithered"
    if doc.nodeByName(LAYERNAME_DITHERED) is None:
        newnode = doc.createFileLayer(LAYERNAME_DITHERED, filename_dithered, "ImageToSize")
        #node = doc.rootNode()
        node.addChildNode(newnode, None)

    doc.refreshProjection()


3. Dithering on the fly upon each change of the undithered image as follows:

• Save image as PNG file (semi-)automatically: https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com ... ave-as-png
• Have a script in the background that detects changes of that PNG file and runs ImageMagick ordered 8x8 dither, something like
  

  Code: Select all

  magick convert test.png -ordered-dither o8x8,6 test_o8x8.gif

• Have a File Layer that automatically loads the dithered image, in case I want to see or edit it in Krita: https://docs.krita.org/en/reference_man ... ayers.html