Turning Photos into Halftone
Halftone photos use dots instead of continuous ink to create the appearance of a solid image. Often newspapers and other print publications use halftone photos, since printing those uses less ink and thus saves money. Increasingly, however, artists, craftspeople, screen printers, and others have been experimenting with halftone effects, and it can be fun to see what happens when a photo becomes half-toned. It’s not difficult to change a regular photo into a halftone image. In fact, many videos on Youtube offer tutorials in creating halftone effects in popular image editing programs like Photoshop and CorelDraw.
Essentially, you’ll want to open your image in your photo editing program, and then choose the halftone screen command. You’ll need to enter a value for the resolution. Halftones are measured in lines per inch, or LPI, and the more lines per inch, the higher the resolution will be. Higher resolutions will look more solid to the naked eye than lower resolutions, so you’ll want to try different levels to capture just the look you’re after. You can also specify what dot shape you’d like to use, such as circles or ellipses.
After you’ve entered these settings, your photo will be a halftone, and you can save it as a separate file, since it’s always a good idea to save your edited photo separately from your original. You might want to go back to the original in the future, and if you save your new file over it, it will be gone.
You can play with different effects, filters, and screens to create various artistic versions of your half-toned photo. You can make it grayscale or color, or distort the halftone settings so much that you barely recognize it as the same photo. Or you can leave it as a straightforward halftone image. What you do with your halftone image is limited only by your imagination. Have fun with it!