RetroDither

New external palette feature. Instant retro computer graphics! Using smart dithering and color schemes to easily re-create any retro computer look.

Learn about license types
  • Trial
Description

RetroDither is a GPU accelerated plugin for Adobe After Effects which allows creating stylized images with dithering and color schemes from retro game consoles and home computer platforms.

You could call it ‘save GIF for web’ on steroids on first sight, but in fact, RetroDithering is capable to do so much more, having more than 10 different ordered and error diffusion dithering algorithms and color palettes varying from several adaptive to classic hardware ones, such as ZX spectrum, CGA, MSX and many more.

Now you can do very authentic stylizing if you’re trying to add some retro feeling into your dither-punk motion graphics or footage.

Demo

Features

  • NEW!!! Custom Palettes!
    • Is a new feature that becomes enabled when you select “Custom…” from the Palette list. After having several user requests for adding more exotic palettes and color schemes in exotic formats, we decided to let users just add a reference image as a Palette source.

    • Feel free to feed any pixel data as a custom palette - be it a reference image or just several pixels of your beloved colorscheme, Retrodither will gather all the colors and use them. You can even use videos!

    • Just be cautious about Custom Palette image resolution, as high resolution images will take more processing time - so, the less Custom Palette layer size, the faster Retrodither will be able to analyze it.

  • 20 different color palettes including C-64 and Apple II
    • Adaptive color palettes work pretty similar to the ones in e.g. Adobe Photoshop “Save for Web” dialog , while named after hardware ones (CGA, ZX Spectrum, C64 etc.) are mimicking actual ancient hardware limitations.

  • 12 different dithering methods
    • RetroDither is generally capable of two types of dithering: error diffusion (including Floyd­Steinberg, Jarvis­Judice, Stucki, Atkinson, Burkes, Siera, Stevenson­Arce algorithms) and ordered dithering using Bayer matrix.

  • 0 to 8x downscaling
    • Performs image downscaling for more stylized look.

  • Threshold slider
    • Is available to alter Bayer dithering algorithms, and also to manage 1­bit color palette mapping.

  • Grayscale
    • Performs additional grayscale conversion of the input. Note that color palette is applied after this operation, which means you won’t necessary have grayscale image on the output of the effect; instead, RetroDither will map shades of gray to colors of output palette, which might give you quite interesting results.

  • Serpentine scan
    • Alters all error diffusion based (non­Bayer) dithering algorithms, producing slightly different result (see the description).

  • Fully GPU Accelerated!

Use any image as a custom palette!

custom_palette2

Pixel art by Ray Noa

Discussions

Want to talk about it?

Head over to r/aescripts to chat with fellow users about this product.

Need Support?

Please open a support ticket to be connected directly with the author of this product

Version History

1.12 -

- Bump version to fix portal update glitch

1.10 -

- License glitch fix

1.9 -

- MFR support
- AE 2025 crash fix

1.7 -

- Framework update
- Fixing Catalina issues

1.6 -

- Framework update

1.51 -

- Fixing corrupted archive content of 1.5

1.5 -

- Adding 16x and 32x downsampling

1.31 -

- Repackaged OSX binaries

1.3 -

- CC2015 compatibility

1.2 -

Adding support for Adobe Premiere; fixing truncation artefacts for 16bit project mode.

1.1.1 -

Fixing bugs with OpenGL context switching on OSX

1.1 -

Adding CS5 support

1.0 -

Initial release

Compatibility

After Effects

2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, CC 2019, CC 2018, CC 2017, CC 2015.3, CC 2015, CC 2014, CC, CS6