Portable Gradiator

Gradiator is a feather-light and portable application you can use to create randomly dithered gradients from colors with optional photos. It offers support for three gradient types: horizontal, vertical and radial.

Most graphic editing tools generate only linear gradients, which are better optimized but typically result in visible color branding after applying the gradient to a large area.

The app's packed in a user-friendly interface made from a small window with two panes for separately configuring gradient and photo settings.

After selecting the gradient type, you can set the two colors by adjusting the RGB channels, tweak the amount of dithering, load a picture from file (PNG, BMP, ICO, EMF, WMF) and put it under the gradient, as well as set the photo size and alpha level.

If you're attempting to generate a radial dither, you can set the center point of the gradient by left-clicking inside the preview area. Right-clicking resets it to the center.

Before saving the gradient image to a PNG file or BMP item without alpha, you can resize it by entering the new width and height, as well as adjust the compression level. It's also possible to apply the dither as your desktop wallpaper.

The entire program's wrapped in a single .exe file that can be saved to a custom directory on the disk or copied to a removable storage unit to directly run Gradiator on any machine without setup. It doesn't modify system registry settings, create files on the HDD without confirmation, or need libraries to work properly.

Dithered gradients were quickly put together by the application in our tests, during which it remained minimal on system resources consumption. No error dialogs popped and Gradiator didn't hang or crash.