Halftone effects in Photoshop

[Pete Wells]

I love the Letraset effect that Rufus, Supersurfer, Johnnystress and other talented gits use on their work but can't seem to get my stupid nut around it.

I know it's the Colour Halftone filter in Photoshop but effective use of it eludes me. Can anyone explain it to me or point me in the direction of a decent tutorial.

Thanks playmates!

[johnnystress]

I cheat- I google halftone pattern, rob the image (shhhh!)- stick it on a separate layer on top of your image and set it to "multiply" or "Overlay" or just adjust the opacity/fill settings to see what looks best

Resize it, erase some of it, flip it etc to see what results you can get . Also playing with the colour/hue settings can give nice results

[Darren Stephens]

Interesting...I've been doing that for a while, too! 
Its a shame they dont do that letratone/transfer stuff anymore. But I suppose it does seem a little old fashioned now, what with all this digi gubbins.

[Jim_Campbell]

I love the Letraset effect that Rufus, Supersurfer, Johnnystress and other talented gits use on their work but can't seem to get my stupid nut around it.

Here's what I do ... it's a faff, but it ends up offering you a lot of flexibility. Effectively you end up creating your own digital sheets of Letratone.

Create a new document the size and resolution of your current artwork but make it Grayscale. (If you go Select All -> Copy then you should have the option to match your new document.)

Fill it with black at whatever grey percentage you want, say, 50%. Then go Image -> Mode -> Bitmap. Make the output resolution the same as the current and choose Method: Halftone Screen. To begin with, I'd only experiment with 'Screen Frequency' -- the lower this number, the larger the dots.

You now have a pattern of black and white dots that simulate 50% grey. Change Mode back to Grayscale (ratio: 1) and Select -> Color Range -> Sampled Colors then click on a black bit and go OK. Now go Edit -> Fill -> White (yes, you could select the white to begin with, but only in this example using 50% black).

Copy. Paste onto your artwork. Change Layer Mode to Multiply and lock the transparency. You now have an 'invisible' halftone pattern, except that you can now paint onto this layer with black (or any colour you choose) and only the halftone dots will be filled in.

I've been experimenting with having three layers created this way, one at 25%, one at 50% and one at 75% so that you can apply three different levels of Letratone-style shading. Remember that when you create the halftone pattern, you have other options, apart from 'Round' -- the line option works quite nicely too. If you create one layer at 45° and one at 135° then you can simulate duotone board.

Cheers!

Jim

[Pete Wells]

Ooooh, that sounds great, cheers Jim. And thanks everyone else, I'll be trying these out as soon as I get five minutes to myself!

[LARF]

I make my own sheets in illustrator and bring them into Photoshop and then scale them down to whatever size I want.

[purgebs]

There are a number of ways you can do this, but the best is to save a small section of an existing dot pattern and use it as a fill. Then you can just click and fill whatever area you like.

First, create your dot pattern. You can experiment with halftone pattern on greyscale gradient fills, or you can simply save patterns off the net. When you have your pattern open in photoshop, select an area of it that can be tiled- by that I mean that it is square, and doesn't cut any dots in half. You can use a fixed ratio selection (1:1) to get it perfectly square.

Once you have your selection, go to Edit>Define Pattern and name it "Letratone 1" or whatever you like. Do this as many times and for as many patterns as you like. Now, whenever you want to fill, simply select the paint bucket tool and set it to 'pattern'. All your saved letratone patterns will appear in the little thumbnail menu.

[purgebs]

Also you can download ready-made screentone patterns from here:
http://c130.deviantart.com/art/Scanline-screentone-patterns-22631618

They come as pattern files you can save directly into your photoshop directory.

[johnnystress]

nice one purgebs- great first(and second) post

welcome aboard

[Smarty]

to add one more nugget to this... once you have your halftones saved as a pattern you can apply it to a custom brush and just paint with the tones.

I find it easiest this way

[pauljholden]

I place my tone on a layer above the artwork - the tone is on a transparent layer (meaning that all the 'white' is actually transparent) then I add an alpha channel to the layer - so now, when I draw I draw on the alpha channel exposing the tone layer. This then also allows me to go into the actual tone (still with alpha channel) and convert some of the black dots to white, so I can get white/black tone.

-pj