LACIMA DitherFactory — Dithering for After Effects

Retro dithering as a real After Effects effect. Drop it on footage or a comp, choose one of 27 algorithms, render. No frame-by-frame round-trips.

Dithering tools live in Photoshop: great for stills, painful for video, with batch exports and frames going back and forth. DitherFactory puts the look inside After Effects as an effect, so it renders like any other effect on your timeline.

Try it before you buy: the free trial is the same plugin, with a red X over the frame until you add a key. Get it on lacimatools.com/ditherfactory.

How it works

1. Apply it: Effect > Stylize > DitherFactory, on footage, a comp, a solid or an adjustment layer.
2. Pick the look: choose the algorithm, shrink the cells with Downscale, set the colours.
3. Render: it renders like any other effect, multi-frame rendering included.

Features

• 27 algorithms: error diffusion (Floyd-Steinberg and family, also in RGB), Bayer, halftone, screens and patterns
• Line, Grid and Dot Screen with an angle and frequency you can keyframe
• Adaptive colours (median cut) and Shades: your own shadow, mid and highlight colours
• Retro palettes: Game Boy, CGA, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Grayscale 4 and Sepia
• Keyframe the look: Dither Amount, Downscale, Noise, Levels, Gamma, Colors, Hue and Saturation
• Works on an adjustment layer: one effect dithers every layer below it
• Pre-filters: Downscale for chunky retro cells, Sharpen, Blur, and a Noise grain that stays the same from render to render
• 8, 16 and 32 bpc projects, Smart Render and multi-frame rendering
• Every setting is a regular After Effects parameter

Requirements

• After Effects on Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit). Tested on After Effects 2026, 2025 and 2024.
• macOS: not yet. Bought it on a Mac by mistake? Full refund.

What you get

• LACIMA_DitherFactory_1.0.0_Windows.zip: the plugin, a one-click installer and INSTALL.txt
• Your license key, the moment you buy it: enter the email of your itch purchase at lacimatools.com/find-my-key and it's issued on the spot
• One key, two computers, works offline
• All 1.x updates included
• Full refund within 14 days if it isn't for you

Who's behind this

I'm Francesco Clemente. I design UI and write sound and music for games, including Placid Plastic Duck Simulator, Starsand and Lootborne. I build these tools to make my own work faster, and every LACIMA tool is in active development. If something is missing or gets in your way, write to me: I read everything.

Support: hello@lacimatools.com