Photoshop Tutorials > Effects & Objects

Halftone Mania

When I was thumbing through some magazines the other day, I noticed a number of ads using halftone effects. Photoshop provides a few different ways to show a halftone effect. This tutorial will walk you through them.

The first one is the Halftone Pattern filter. We'll start with our image, I used another from PhotoSpin (PhotoSpin #1490009), and extracting the object from the background.

The Halftone Pattern Filter works with the two colors you have chosen as your foreground/background. I sampled two colors from her skin.

Duplicate the layer Ctrl + J. Go to Filter > Sketch > Halftone Pattern. You can adjust the settings as you wish, my settings were:

Size: 2

Contrast: 5

Pattern Type: dot

Prett exciting, huh? I haven't found any practical uses for that one yet, but now you know it's there.

The next one is the Color Halftone filter. Start by duplicating your layer Ctrl + J. Select the original layer (not the one you just duplicated) and run a Gaussian Blur Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Set the amount high, to 30 or 40 pixels.

Now go to Filter > Pixelate > Color Halftone. You can adjust the settings as you want, but I just left mine default. Hit OK, and now...

The third way is a little more of the effect I see in magazines. Right-click on your object layer and choose Duplicate Layer. When the dialog pops up, name it whatever you like, but set the destination to New.

In your new document, go to Image > Mode > Grayscale. A dialog might pop-up asking to discard the color information. Choose yes.

Now run a big Gaussian Blur Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur of around 30 or 40.

Go to Image > Mode > Bitmap. Under Method, choose Halftone Screen.

In the next dialog box, set the Frequency to around 8 or 10 and the Shape to Round.

You should now get an effect like this:

Set the Image Mode back to Grayscale Image > Mode > Grayscale. Apply a slight Guassian blur of around 1-pixel to smooth out the rough edges.

Now bring up the Levels Dialog Ctrl + L and drag the sliders closer to each other to sharpen the pattern a bit.

You can now drag that layer back to your original document.

That's about it for Photoshop's halftone effects.