![]() Plastic Transfer Sheets: A Low-Budget Solution The downside to CraftTone was that eventually the board would yellow and ALL the lines would begin to appear, heedless of the artists’ original intensions. Of course, like all magic, it comes at a great cost. ![]() One liquid summoned the lines in one direction, and another made visible the lines in the other direction. This liquid would chemically interact with the invisible lines on the board, making them appear. The artist would draw on the board and then “paint” in the gray tone with a clear liquid. It was a specially prepared art board printed with invisible cross-hatching. They could cross-hatch, which was free, but laborious, or they could buy and apply tones to their drawings, using any one of a number of commercial products made specifically for the artist/designer. They could do so as long as they knew the line screen of the art’s destination. (If you are creating artwork for publication, you might want to think twice-or at the very least, consult with your printer early in the process.Eventually, it fell to the commercial artists to add tone to their drawing however they chose. Experiment! Play! Make multiple versions and overprint one over the other. The halftone effect lets you create a vast number of variations from your images. (First select the image inside the frame, and then choose a color from the Swatches or Color panel.) The nice thing about bitmapped images like this is that you can place them in InDesign and then colorize them. When Photoshop documents in Bitmap mode are saved, every pixel ends up either solid black or white. If you are printing your halftone image, rather than downsampling it, you’ll save it as a high-resolution, bitmapped PSD or TIFF file. ![]() This will result in a softer, more elegant effect. ![]() Change it back to RGB, and then change the resolution of the image, resampling it to 72 or 96 ppi using Image > Image Size. Then, after you make the halftone, use Image > Mode to set it back to Grayscale. While you may be tempted to use 72 or 96 ppi at this step, I would recommend that you first use 300 ppi or so. If you’re just making web or other on-screen graphics, then you’ll want to set this to something smaller. If you are planning on printing your image, you’re probably going to want to set the pixels per inch (ppi) to 1000 or more (for super smooth edges on your halftones, I would recommend 1500 or 2000 ppi). This lets you control the resolution of the image as you convert from grayscale to bitmap while applying the halftone effect. I skipped over one important setting earlier on in the Bitmap dialog box: the Output field. Notice that I’m adjusting the frequency (lower frequency numbers make larger “spots”) and angle of the grid in each of these examples. This is a more traditional halftone spot shape, reflecting how halftones really look in print.īut you don’t have to use the Round spot here. Instead of black circles that just get bigger and bigger, the darker tones are represented by white circles on a field of black: In the image at the beginning of this article, I used the Round shape, which makes circles.īut if you look really closely, these are different than the circles that the filter uses. You can choose a Frequency, an Angle, and a Shape for the halftone. Instead, to get my halftone, I choose Halftone Screen from the Use pop-up menu and click OK. If I choose 50% Threshold from the Method pop-up menu-which is what most of us use when we switch mode to Bitmap-then Photoshop simply makes all my dark gray pixels black and light gray pixels white. When I do this, Photoshop asks me what I want to do with gray tones in the image: Now, I want a black-and-white halftone, so I convert the RGB image to Grayscale:Īnd then I head back to the Image > Mode submenu and choose Bitmap. I made it by just creating an “angle gradient” in Photoshop and then running the Twirl filter on it. First, here’s the image that I’m going to be working with:.The Color Halftone filter does an okay job of making halftones, but there is another, far more powerful method. But on a grayscale image, you get circular dots that vary in size: On a color image, you get multiple CMYK dots of various sizes that overlap. To make the four-color “ rosette” halftone in the middle of the image above, I simply chose Filter > Pixelate > Color Halftone. But if you make those spots bigger, you break the illusion and the spots (or dots or whatever you want to call them) become an integral part of the image itself.īut how can you make these halftone effects yourself? It turns out to be super easy in Photoshop. If you look really closely at an image in a printed newspaper or magazine you’ll see that what appears at first to be “continuous tone” (like a photograph) is actually constructed of thousands of tiny spots.
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