Skip to content

Print & screen effect

Poster Dither

Poster Dither is a halftone and retro screen effect in FRCTL, the browser VJ studio. Banded color with ordered retro texture.

Runs live on video, images, a camera or generated art. Stack it with any other effect, and route LFOs, envelopes or any of ten audio bands to its controls so it moves with the music.

Try Poster Dither free All effects

The untouched demo art: an eye inside a triangle over wavy teal, blue and peach lines — Source

The eye-in-triangle art in banded teal, peach and pink with a fine dither grain along every tone step — Poster Dither, default settings

What Poster Dither does

Crushes each colour channel into a handful of flat levels and breaks the steps with a fine 4x4 Bayer weave, so the peach and teal waves turn to banded plates with a grainy edge. Bands sets how many levels survive, Shift rotates each channel toward the next for off-key hues, and Dither swaps the weave for random grain or hard, clean steps.

Using Poster Dither

Where it works: Retro game-box cover art, a flyer that should look screen-printed, or a still for a Reel where flat banded colour still reads at thumbnail size.
With the music: Nothing here runs on a clock. Send B3 bass body to Bands so the steps smooth out on each bass note and fall back to hard plates between them, or put a beat-synced LFO on Shift to swing the hues off-key every bar.
Starting point: Bands at a quarter, Shift at centre, Grain at three-quarters, Dither on Ordered, so the steps are few and the weave shows.

Controls

Bands: Poster quantization band count.
Shift: G/B/R channel rotation strength.
Grain: Ordered dither threshold strength.
Dither: Ordered is the Bayer grid, Noise breaks the bands with grain, None leaves them hard.

Pairs well with Poster Dither