A temporal dithering manager uses temporal dithering to reduce contouring artifacts due to bit limiting. The temporal dithering manager truncates low order bits of an input signal, creates a temporal dither signal based on the truncated low order bits and applies the temporally created dither signal to the truncated signal. A temporal filtering manager applies a temporal filter to the truncated signal, thereby improving the quality of the truncated signal. The temporal dithering can be applied at a preprocessing stage, and the temporal filtering at a post-processing stage.