Design Tips: I Have Become Halftone, Destroyer of Shirts... (Part One)

!!! There was an important step missed in the method I use !!!

When you paste your paint into your gray-scale file, step 4, you need to make your layer black before proceeding to step 5! The halftone conversion uses value (light to dark) to determine the thickness of the halftones. If you have a solid (fully opaque) light gray circle, and a solid black circle next to each other you will see when converted that the halftones are thin on the gray circle and thick on the black. In a nutshell if you have a very light color, the halftones will be nearly invisible, regardless of how opaque the original paint was. Making the paint black will ensure that the transparency is converted correctly.

I hope this makes sense :slight_smile:

here is a image showing the error created by solid a color of different values. they should all have the same halftones because they all have the same transparency, but the values mess it up.

Aw crud! I knew I’d forget something. It may take a little while, but I’ll see if I can get that corrected. Thanks!

no worries! it happens :slight_smile:

nah, its Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita, for what its worth

Yes, which is in the quote block… :slight_smile:

Do we have to use “lines” for halftones? Personally, I like using the “round” halftones as mentioned on the second method.

No. Sometimes, lines work out better. Sometimes, dots work out better. It’s all the artist’s preference in which to incorporate into their design.

Manga Studio has a HUGE tones library and is super simple to add halftones where you want them. I’m actually beginning to do all my illustration in MS, I think it blows Photoshop out of the water for illustrating.

Ive also heard good things about MS. Id like to pick up a copy sometime and give it a whirl.

Likewise, I’ve heard it’s good stuff, and not just from Manga artists.

Another tool people might consider is Filter Forge. It is on sale right now for 60% off, til Friday I believe. I bought a copy for my house to give it a try. It has some very nice halftone and woodcut actions, as well as a gorgeous watercolor action.

Yes, and Smith Micro puts it on sale every once in a while. I got the EX version (normally $299) for $99 not too long ago!

I’m just getting into t-shirt design and when looking into halftoning before, I wondered about the minimum dot size. I figured, “Surely, a single pixel can’t be printed.” Seems like it would make sense to be able to control that minimum size as well, does it not?

Ah I remember the days when snippy wooters would complain that halftoning was somehow “cheating” and they would rail on artists for being unauthentic like it was easy to make good halftones… Times are a changin!

I think that was back when woot was outlawing halftones. I know I got rejected one time for my background in my thumbnail being a gradient when it wasn’t even a halftone, just a straight solid color. The rejector was having one of those ‘absences’ he sometimes has and saw something that wasn’t there. unrejected it several hours later, but lost all my votes.

Great tutorials! No wonder little dots have been running rampant in the Derby nowadays.

I found a good tutorial on making custom halftones.

http://www.digitalartform.com/archives/2009/06/custom_halftone.html

If you are using a program other than Photoshop Hard Mix can be achieved by placing the gray scaled art on a layer above the halftone. Set the layer mode of the art to Addition. Merge the two layers. Use Threshold to convert the image to strictly black and white pixels.

Here’s a sample of a custom 5 LPI Hex halftone I made using the tutorial linked above.


Other notes:

When using the layer mask method of creating halftones, you should invert the mask’s colors before converting the layer mask to halftones. After you convert the mask to halftones invert the colors again. This will make sure your halftones are dots of color rather than holes to the color below.

Thanks for pointing this out! Makes perfect sense. The purple squiggly line and gradient rectangle have areas of solid color but the created halftones in the tutorial lose the solid colors (the top of the gradient should be solid purple, but it’s not).

What’s the best method for changing the grays to blacks in the bitmap? Levels? Thanks!

One thing I noticed; between steps 6 and 7, before you can use the magic wand tool you have to convert back to grayscale image mode. (at least on my version of PS7)

For my fellow designers using the free, open-source Inkscape, here’s the halftone tutorial.
Since Inkscape tends to hang with lots of shapes onscreen, I recommend NOT doing a union of the tiled clones, but rather taking a quick screenshot of them and then tracing the resulting bitmap into a path.

As a soapbox sidenote, if you’re creating intellectual property that you want to sell (ie a shirt design), using pirated software is first-degree hypocrisy.