Best quality dithering library in C

Question

I'm developing a texture atlas packer to use with OpenGL, and I'm currently looking for an open-source (it's better if it's a library, but an open-source software would be good as well!) solution that will render the best results for color palette creation / dithering. It really doesn't need to be fast, but needs to achieve optimal results. It would be best if there is a possibility for 4-bit-per-pixel palette generation.

I have provided code for Floyd-Steinberg dithering here: http://stackoverflow.com/a/17900812/342646 — RawMean, Jul 27 '13 at 18:00

Kornel · Accepted Answer · 2013-03-15T03:19:18.983

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pngquant is available as a pure C library.

ImageMagick uses octtree, which is fast, but not the best quality.

pngquant uses MedianCut with several additional improvements, and is likely to give higher quality.

pngquant has speed/quality trade-off setting which can improve quality a bit further, and also has custom dithering algorithm (variation of Floyd-Steinberg) that doesn't add noise to well-quantized areas of the image.

edited Mar 15 '13 at 03:19

answered Jan 03 '12 at 20:37

Kornel

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well, I guess this is a best answer after all! Thank you!! – Waneck Jan 05 '12 at 18:23

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 16 '11 at 14:34

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Imagemagick is a very powerful C library for graphical manipulation: http://www.imagemagick.org/ It has commandline tools, but can also be used as a C library.

answered Sep 16 '11 at 14:34

Gabriel Ross

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Thank you! That will do. One question though, as I really need not the one with most features, but the one with the best dithering algorithm, do you know if their dithering algorithm is any good? – Waneck Sep 19 '11 at 10:09

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 19 '11 at 10:31

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For future reference, I found PNGNQ, which is a pretty good library for image quantization. Their samples are amazing.

answered Sep 19 '11 at 10:31

Waneck

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Best quality dithering library in C

3 Answers3