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Photoshop Tips – Create a Custom Halftone Design

Posted on September 26, 2008

The halftone pattern is one of those design elements that never seems to get old. You can make your designs even more timeless by getting creative with your halftone patterns. Let’s take a look at a quick and easy way to add a custom halftone effect to your images or designs.

Open up the image you want to use. You’ll need to be able to draw outside the borders of the image, so hit the F key to switch to full screen mode.

Use Pen Tool to Make Selection
Select the Pen tool, and make sure you’re set to draw Paths. Being by drawing around the area where you want to add the halftone pattern. Continue your selection outside the borders of the image, then complete the path by clicking on the starting poing of the path you’ve created.

With the path now complete, create a new layer. This is where you have a decision to make. If you want to end up with black dots, fill the new layer with black. If you want white dots, fill the layer with white.

Hit Cmd/Ctrl + Enter to turn the path into a selection. Now fill the selection area with the color you chose in the previous step. So, if your layer is white, fill the selected area with black. Go ahead and deselect the selection area (Cmd/Ctrl + D).

Blur Layer
Now we’re going to add blur to the layer you’ve created. Go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and choose a large blur radius. For my example, I chose 50px, which works pretty good for a 72ppi image.

Apply Halftone Pattern
To add the halftone pattern, go to Filter > Pixelate > Color Halftone. Now, the menu that appears to you may look intimidating at first, but we’re really only going to use one setting. The first one, Max Radius, you should leave set to 8. Again, this is a pretty good setting for 72ppi images. For 300ppi images, try 25-30. Now you can set all the other settings to 0. See! That wasn’t so bad, now was it? [ad name=”468×60″]

Invert Colors
After applying the Color Halftone filter, your layer will need to invert the colors. To do this, simply hit Cmd/Ctrl + I.

Jump Selection to New Layer
Grab the Magic Wand Tool, make sure Contiguous is unchecked in the menu bar, then click on the color you want to keep. Once your selection is made, Cmd/Ctrl + J to jump the selection to a new layer.

You can hide the original halftone layer so that the only visible layers are your original image and the new halftone layer that contains only the dots you wanted to keep.

If you have white dots, you may want to change the blending mode of your dot layer to Lighten if you have black fringes around the edges of your dots. Likewise, change the blend mode of your black dots layer to Multiply to hide the effects of white fringing.

At this point, you can continue editing your image as normal. For creative inspiration, you can add a hue/saturation adjustment layer over your image to give it a more stylistic look. To apply a color to your halftone pattern, simply right-click your halftone layer, choose Blending Options, and apply a Color Overlay. You can also apply a Gradient Overlay to vary the intensity or color of the effect. Just have fun and experiment!

      

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Comments

2 Responses to “Photoshop Tips – Create a Custom Halftone Design”

  1. ola on November 26th, 2008 12:52 pm

    nice.

  2. Dana on August 18th, 2010 7:07 am

    This is a very interesting effect – and so easy to achieve! Thank you for sharing it :)

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