I saw this option in Texture Painting, under the brush Options and I have no idea how this is used. I setup a background image using 8-bit grayscale and load into the Texture Slot, Single Image, and the reason I’m doing that is because the option says
Amount of dithering when painting on 8-bit images.
But when I paint on it, close up, and I cannot see what the option is actually doing, affecting my texture painting:
I have converted an image to Indexed (256) 8-bit mode an image using GIMP, then exported to JPG to use as single image to paint on:
as you can see the dithering effects GIMP produced on close up on the left hand side, while painting on the right, turning dithering to max 2 and 0 and I cannot see any different.
The dithering is exported in your file.
the blender dithering is with what you paint and blender is not painting in 8 bit at all.
what are you expecting from blender painter over your 8 bit converted to 16 bit jpg image?
I think you expecting the wrong thing here. Technically one thing is mimicing the other. If you have 8bit per channel in an image you technically can just store 256 different values in that channel. Dithering was and i an solution to this problem. Its about randomly distributing colors in a spatial range as the eye mixes the colors together from a certain distance and you get the impression that there are more colors there than they really are.
The option here is to control the randomness or intensity of the dithering applied. Leaving the alpha channel aside, we are still talking of 8 bit per channel what sum up to 24 bit color values what is still rougly 16 million colors in an rgb image and most dithered colors will still be too close to each other to differentiate, but if you play around with dabs of very tranparent colors you’ll see a difference.
What you posted as image there is also dithering, but with an indexed color palette or at least a much lower color channel depth. Its also taking the colored pixels far more away from each other to increase the effect and all that is what you would do with an image filter or a shader that is mimicing the effect on a drastic level for artistic purposes, its not what the option here is about.
Well, yes in general what I said is also true for RGBA images, there its just 32 bit and not 24bit cause you have another 8bit channel for the alpha values. Overall its just restricted and applied to 8bit images ( per channel) . But what I told you is general knowledge about the topic, I also never really had any noticable visual influence on the result by using the setting in blender. And what I meant is that brush strokes or repeated dabs with very little brush strength on a black background should be good to test it, if you want to test it out. But otherwise simply forget about that feature its pretty useless IMO.
