Halftone Print Effect
Hand it a photograph and it comes back as a printed halftone — one ink, one screen angle, tone carried entirely by how big the dots are, with the coarseness set against something in the picture. Two fields.
We made two examples, from two different photographs: a denim-jacket portrait in black on newsprint, and a whippet in blue on grey. The second is the more useful of the two, because it shows where the grid gives way.
You get a one-ink halftone: dots on a single lattice, at one angle and one pitch, growing with the tone and merging into solid ink in the shadows. Details finer than a couple of dots, like eyelashes, disappear. Where the photo's own texture is close to the screen size, like the grass under the whippet, the lattice breaks into random stipple. Ask for a screen coarser than your subject's detail, and compare two far-apart corners.
Generated for this library
Input
Coarseness coarse - about six dots across the width of
an eye
Ink/paper one black ink on warm off-white newsprint
Photograph portrait.png (1254 x 1254)
Returned 1 image · 1:1 · a screened portrait
values one ink, one strength - dots grow and merge
into solid, and in the darkest parts the
paper is left as small white dots
grid one lattice at one angle; the straight-edge
test passes in all four corners
pitch about five dots across the eye against the
six that were asked for
detail eyelashes, stubble and the jacket's topstitch
all gone, as the pitch requires
words none, in any scriptYou fill in 2 fields — the braced lines at the top. Everything below them is fixed.
- 1How coarse the screen is, measured against something in the picture
- 2The ink and the paper
Halftone Print Effect
What this makes
Hand it a photograph and it comes back as a printed halftone — one ink, one screen angle, tone carried entirely by how big the dots are, with the coarseness set against something in the picture. Two fields.
The whole template, in one piece. The steps below are the entire workflow.
How to use it
- Copy the whole template with the button above.
- Attach the photograph and paste the template in the same message.
- Replace the two FIELDS lines. Pick the thing you measure the dots against from the picture itself — an eye, a window, a wheel.
- Check the grid: put a straight edge along the dots in two far-apart corners. If the angle differs, the screen has followed the subject and the print is fake.
- Look for grey. A halftone that has grey in it has been drawn rather than screened.
What you swap
- How coarse the screen is, measured against something in the picture
- coarse — about six dots across the width of an eye
- The ink and the paper
- one black ink on warm off-white newsprint
Before it runs
- A photograph, attached to the message, with a real range of tone in it. A flat, evenly lit picture halftones into an even field of identical dots and says nothing.
- A size, not a word. 'Coarse' and 'fine' mean nothing to a run with no ruler; six dots across an eye is a measurement it can act on.
- Acceptance that fine detail goes. Anything smaller than about two dots cannot be represented, so a coarse screen eats eyelashes, text, and thin wires.
- One ink, or two named ones. This is a press, not a printer — every extra colour is another pass and another screen angle.
When to reach for it
When something should look like it came off a press: a zine, a poster, a band shirt, a newspaper pastiche, a risograph run. Templates in this genre ask for a halftone effect and give you a soft grey photograph with a dot pattern sitting on top of it, which is two renderings at once and reads as neither.
What changes
- One photograph in, one halftone out — every point is ink or paper, nothing in between.
- The dot grid stays at one angle and one pitch across the whole picture instead of following the subject.
- You set the coarseness against something visible in the frame, so it is a size and not an adjective.
- Highlights are small dots on bare paper, shadows are small gaps in solid ink, and the noisiest band is the middle.
- One image, no type, no border, no paper mock-up.
Pairs with
- Woodcut Print EffectHand it a photograph and it comes back as a woodcut — no grey anywhere, every middle tone made out of parallel cuts spaced wide or close, because a block can only print ink or nothing. Two fields.
- Backlit Silhouette EffectHand it a photograph and it comes back as a cut silhouette lit from behind — no interior anywhere, so every part that has to be recognised must reach the edge and show itself against the light. Two fields.
- Chalkboard Drawing EffectHand it a photograph and it comes back drawn in chalk on a black board — where the darkest thing in the picture is bare board, because chalk adds light and there is no way to draw a dark line. Two fields.