How to Make Amazing Halftone Effects with Photoshop

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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. This is called a 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.

Three-part image shows one photo as continuous tone, color halftone, and grayscale halftone

But how can you make these halftone effects yourself? It turns out to be super easy in Photoshop.

To make the four-color “rosette” halftone in the middle of the image above, I simply chose Filter > Pixelate > Color Halftone. On a color image, you get multiple CMYK dots of various sizes that overlap. But on a grayscale image, you get circular dots that vary in size:

Enlargement of grayscale halftone shows dots of varying sizes

How to make better halftones

The Color Halftone filter does an okay job of making halftones, but there is another, far more powerful method. This is what I usually do:

  1. First, here’s the image that I’m going to be working with:

spiral

I made it by just creating an “angle gradient” in Photoshop and then running the Twirl filter on it. Now, I want a black-and-white halftone, so I convert the RGB image to Grayscale:

Photoshop screen shot shows conversion of RGB to grayscale

And then I head back to the Image > Mode submenu and choose Bitmap. When I do this, Photoshop asks me what I want to do with gray tones in the image:

Convert to bitmap in photoshop shows output reset to 1000 pixels per inch using Halftone Screen method

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. Instead, to get my halftone, I choose Halftone Screen from the Use pop-up menu and click OK. This is where the real control lies:

Halftone Screen dialog box shows frequency at 10 lines per inch, angle at 0 degrees, and shape set to Line

You can choose a Frequency, an Angle, and a Shape for the halftone. In the image at the beginning of this article, I used the Round shape, which makes circles.

Resulting bitmap halftone

But if you look really closely, these are different than the circles that the filter uses. Instead of black circles that just get bigger and bigger, the darker tones are represented by white circles on a field of black:

real halftone spots on bitmap halftone show realistic conversion to white spots on black

This is a more traditional halftone spot shape, reflecting how halftones really look in print.

But you don’t have to use the Round spot here. You can use Line:

spiral image with grays represented as black lines of varying thicknesses

or Cross:

cross halftone

…or several other screens. Notice that I’m adjusting the frequency (lower frequency numbers make larger “spots”) and angle of the grid in each of these examples.

Adjusting image resolution for web

I skipped over one important setting earlier on in the Bitmap dialog box: the Output field. This lets you control the resolution of the image as you convert from grayscale to bitmap while applying the halftone effect. 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).

If you’re just making web or other on-screen graphics, then you’ll want to set this to something smaller. 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.

Then, after you make the halftone, use Image > Mode to set it back to Grayscale. Change it back to RGB, and then change the resolution of the image, resampling it to 72 or 96 ppi using Image > Image Size.

This will result in a softer, more elegant effect. Now you can export as PNG or JPEG.

Save your image for print

If you are printing your halftone image, rather than downsampling it, you’ll save it as a high-resolution, bitmapped PSD or TIFF file. When Photoshop documents in Bitmap mode are saved, every pixel ends up either solid black or white.

The nice thing about bitmapped images like this is that you can place them in InDesign and then colorize them. (First select the image inside the frame, and then choose a color from the Swatches or Color panel.)

spiral halftone as lines colored magenta

The halftone effect lets you create a vast number of variations from your images. Experiment! Play! Make multiple versions and overprint one over the other. (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.)

multiple versions of spiral halftone colored cyan, magenta, yellow and superimposed out of alignment

Enjoy!

David Blatner is the co-founder of the Creative Publishing Network, InDesign Magazine, CreativePro Magazine, and the author or co-author of 15 books, including Real World InDesign. His InDesign videos at LinkedIn Learning (Lynda.com) are among the most watched InDesign training in the world.
You can find more about David at 63p.com

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  • Jenny Smith says:

    Awesome article! I definitely want to try this out! Besides setting to at least 1000, do you have any other recommendations for those planning to print something like this?

    • David Blatner says:

      I can’t think of anything else. If you’re printing on a high-resolution device (platesetter), you may want 1500+ ppi. And you probably want to make it “at size” (so that you don’t have to resize it later).

  • Marty S says:

    Very nice, thanks! I’ll definitely put this to use.

  • Jerry says:

    Very Interesting, Thank you.

  • softserialhq says:

    Yes… its me again!

    That was a great tutorial, and it really is a great way to punch up photos.

    Its especially helpful having almost a two in one tool, to not only up the colours but also add some impact with tasteful contrast.

    Keep the tutorials coming! I continue to use previous tutorial techniques in my processing all the time!

    Thanks!

  • James Hance says:

    That’s a perfect explanation for creating the poster effect I am after. Thanks!

  • tim says:

    I’ve never heard of going to such high resolutions for print. 1,000-2000 ppi? What happened to the 300 standard?

    • David Blatner says:

      You very rarely need higher than 250 or 300 ppi for grayscale or color images. But for bitmap (black-and-white-pixels-only) you need much higher resolution. Of course, if you’re only printing to a laser printer or inkjet you don’t need 2000 ppi, but if you’re printing to a platesetter or high end digital printer, you need it, or else you’ll see jaggy edges.

      • dejan says:

        yes, but 600 dpi is enough for standard offset print. no need to burden your processor, mail, wetransfers etc with higher resolution. I am using bitmap halftones for +30 years,

      • David Blatner says:

        @dejan: Perhaps you are printing on porous paper that blurs the edges, but on good quality paper I can easily see the difference between 600 and 1200 ppi in output. I don’t like jaggy edges.

  • Lara says:

    For more advanced halftone techniques you might want to use specialized software, like HalftonePro. It also allows saving as a vector to save you the pain of tracing a raster halftone.

  • Susan says:

    David, this is so useful, and an area of Photoshop I’ve never played with. But can you please describe how you created the ‘angle gradient’ you started with before applying the twirl filter? When I try to duplicate your steps, I can’t get that strong line between the light and dark’ my twirl is feathered & fuzzy.

    • David Blatner says:

      Susan: The “Angle Gradient” is the third button in the Options bar after choosing the Gradient tool (after Linear and Radial). I just made a black-to-white Angle Gradient.

  • JP says:

    Using your instructions, the half tone does take on the “inverted”, but the dots all remain the same size. What can I do to make the dots variable sizes?

  • JP says:

    Also, is there a way to influence the minimum and maximum size of the dots?

    • David Blatner says:

      The dot size is based on the gray value. 5% gray will be a small dot, and 50% gray should be larger one.

  • Andy says:

    Thank You, this really helped!

  • Tahlia says:

    Fantastic tutorial. Is there a way to experiment with the bitmap options, so I can play around with the different method, frequency, angle and so on to see what results. For eg. usually there’s a preview mode you can tick and you can see the results immediately, this doesn’t appear here. What I’ve been doing is a bit tiresome, and that’s basically undoing back to greyscale, then doing the whole mode-bitmap-options step again.

    Many thanks in advance

  • blogger says:

    The nice thing about bitmapped images like this is that you can place them in InDesign and then colorize them. (First select the image inside the frame, and then choose a color from the Swatches or Color panel.)

  • Sam Shields says:

    David, thank you very much for the tutorial. I have an image which I wish to represent in half tone for a silkscreen process. it is mainly black and white but there is a small amount of green and pink in it too. I figure that I should be able to represent it if I have white paper and then three colours black green and pink. How could I do this in photoshop? regards Sam

  • Kim Leclair says:

    thanks… i keep getting an error message: could not complete the command because of a program error
    Any idea what i might be doing wrong?

    • David Blatner says:

      Kim: That’s weird. A “program error” is usually something serious (like crashing). I would try quitting and restarting the program. Not sure what could cause that.

  • vivian says:

    how would i add halftones on a portrait with colour? like i have a digital portrait of a celebrity and i’m trying to add a halftone but it removes the colour and makes it in grayscale which is not the way i want it? HELP

  • My Friend, Mercedes Benz once created a printed advertisement in which by looking closely at the reticulation grid with a magnifying glass it was possible to distinguish the MB logo in every single dot. How did they do it?!

  • Dan says:

    Nice read. Its commonly unexplored, whats possible with psd. We used this to make aluminum and copperplate prints.

  • Superb article. After many failed attempts in GIMP, I was happy to do this PS. You got any tips on having just a background layer around the actual artwork?

  • Phil says:

    David, not sure if you’re still active on this post. I followed the steps and got a great result in PS. Placed the image into Indesign to try out colouring it, and ran into a problem. I can colour the image, but it’s a solid colour (with the black lines of the bitmapped image remaining black) so you can’t see through it when duplicating and placing a different coloured one on top. Or underneath.

    • David Blatner says:

      Phil: My guess is that you had the frame selected when you chose a color in InDesign. To color the bitmap image inside the frame, you have to either select the image with the Direct Selection tool or just double-click with the Selection tool (which selects the image inside the frame).

  • Carmelita Abella says:

    Thank you so much David!You’re really a good teacher!
    I just want to ask if I print my design on tshirt, what are the recommended parameters?
    -Ricky from the Philippines

    • David Blatner says:

      Ricky: I’m sorry, I don’t know enough about screen printing these days to know the right resolution, and it depends a lot on what effect you’re looking for. But I’m guessing that 300 ppi is high enough resolution.

  • Chris M says:

    How will this work when the output if offset web press (newspaper)? I make the newspaper in InDesign and send it to a press to be printed, so I am not a press operator. Would the plate maker make a halftone image of the halftone we made? Or would it just print the dots? I know this sounds confusing.

    • David Blatner says:

      Chris: No the platemaker should not make a halftone, because it is a black-and-white “bitmap” image. There are no gray colors.

  • Pastelka says:

    Thank You so much! I use Photoshop every day and bitmap conversion very often to. Halftone Screen is the one think I overlooked :)

  • Ana says:

    This is exactly what I needed to know after many trials and errors. My present challenge is to save 72dpi photos which should be printed at 300dpi. It is for an album cover. I followed the steps. The photos looks awesome printed with my canon ip8750 but it is not the size I want. You mentioned above ‘you may want 1500+ ppi. And you probably want to make it “at size”’. I tried to make it ‘at size’ but it looks horrible know. Is there some kind of mathematical formula to resize photos. I spent yesterday trying to figure this out :|

  • Daniel says:

    If I want to make a rainbow using 4 colors and half tone, how do I do it? I need each of the four colors to be its own layer. (I’m going to screen print this, and we only have 4 ink things, so I can only use up to four colors)

    Thanks

    • David Blatner says:

      Daniel: How many colors are you trying to create? Do you want a smooth rainbow, or just like 6 or 7 individual colors (like “stripes”)?

  • Mark and Debbie Sutterby-Watts says:

    Hi David.
    Great information about halftones.
    Is there a way we can use halftones on a bitmap photo in black and white that we are able to colour in by hand?

    • David Blatner says:

      I’m not sure what you mean by colour in by hand. But I have seen some beautiful artwork where people convert a photo to black and white bitmap halftones with this technique, then print them and use watercolor or colored pencil on the print.

  • Hi, this really helpful. I make woodcut prints with a CNC router and this got me going on some basic black and white prints. I’ve also done CMYK kinda like screenprint separations by splitting the channels after turning it into a halftone ovals. Do you know if there is a way to make different kinds of halftone shapes like some of the line and shape variations done with the bitmap mode? Or does it only work with ovals and circles. I liked what you showed at the end of the tutorial, kinda like that but actual traditional printing. Essentially I want to know if I can control 4 color halftones the way you can control it when you have the greyscale. Should I just play with different filters and then separate the channels? Thank you so much!!!

    • David Blatner says:

      This particular effect can only be done when converting a grayscale image, so to make a color version, you would first separate CMYK channels into 4 grayscale images, then process each one, then put them together again. See my comment above about multichannel images.

  • Hey, Thank you!!!! I appreciate it!

  • Jeff Jahn says:

    David, thank you for this tutorial. I am able to follow all the way through and end up with a beautiful dot pattern but I don’t seem to be able to get rid of the background. Every time I go to place the image in Indesign it has a white background behind it blocking out the background I want to lay this dot pattern over. What am I doing wrong?

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