Dithering Slave (Rust + eframe/egui)

A small desktop tool for palette-based dithering and palette editing written in Rust without a heavy framework: image decoding/encoding, palette extraction (Median Cut), Floyd–Steinberg dithering, and a simple GUI built with eframe/egui.

This project is a practical playground for Rust + realtime-ish image processing with a minimal, hackable codebase.

Created without vibecoding

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Screenshots

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Features

• GUI:
  • Native desktop window via eframe/egui
  • Top menu (Open/Save/Exit, palette actions, etc.)
  • Central preview with Contain scaling (image stays centered on resize)
  • Bottom palette bar with clickable color swatches (Click to change colors)
• Image pipeline:
  • Load image from file (PNG/JPG/etc.)
  • Optional scale on load (e.g. 0.5×) for faster processing
  • Work internally with RGBA16 for processing + RGBA8 for display
• Palette:
  • Extract palette using Median Cut (configurable size: 8/16/etc.)
  • Palette override (edit colors without rebuilding the palette)
  • Replace palette color → update the preview instantly
• Dithering:
  • Floyd–Steinberg dithering to a fixed palette
  • Toggle Original / Dithered
• Export:
  • Save dithered output as PNG or etc.

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Tech Stack / Dependencies

• eframe, egui — GUI
• image — decode/encode images
• rfd — native file dialogs (Open/Save)
• serde, toml/json — config persistence (if you add it)

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Build & Run

Requirements

• Rust (stable recommended)
• Cargo

Run (debug)

cargo run