Adding texture to illustrations or photographs is something that can pack that extra punch and make a graphic really pop with character. In this tutorial we will explore Photoshop’s bitmap and half-toning tools and effects. Much of this tutorial will be based on experimenting with the various options and finding out what works best for you.

Take chances and play around, you may find an effect that is exactly what you are looking for.

What is half-toning?

Halftoning is the conversion of a continuous toned image into a grid of regularly spaced dots or cells. These halftone spots vary in size to simulate the appearance of shading and light. Smaller dots appear lighter; larger dots, darker. This technique is used in printers, as well as the publishing industry.

If you inspect a photograph in a newspaper, you will notice that the picture is composed of black dots even though it appears to be composed of grays. This is possible because of the spatial integration performed by our eyes. Our eyes blend fine details and record the overall intensity

Lets begin by previewing the images we will be working with. An old toy robot, skyscraper, and a mouth.

1. Create a new document that is 630 wide and 400 pixels in height. The resolution will be set to 72 dpi since this is just for screen display.

2. Using various shapes and gradients create a background that you like. This will be the bottom layer of whole piece. The colors aren’t important here, but I used some bright yellows and pinks to give it a vibrant feel. Try using some gradients and use the layer blending mode to get some interesting results. I created some basic shapes with the shape tool and set the layer mode to softlight to give it some transparency.

3. Now take your source images and place them on a separate document. Select Image>Mode>Grayscale. Now select Image>Mode>Bitmap and you will have a dialog box with options for ‘Halftone Screen’.
Hit OK, and then you will get another dialog box with various options for frequency, angle and shape.
This is where most of the experimenting will come into play.

The various options for the shape used in the halftone screen are round, diamond, ellipse, line, square and cross.

All of these examples were created using a frequency of 15 and an angle of 42.

Back to our source images. I used the lasso tool to select the area of the mouth that I want to use. Then I used the steps above to create a bitmap then a halftone from that.

4. Next copy and paste this image onto your main document. You may need to select the parts that you want to use with the lasso tool and also play with colorizing and blending modes.

5. Repeat the process above for all of the source images you want to use. When you import them back into your main canvass play with repetition and scale to create a dynamic image.

Hints:

1. Try and always scale down the original source image before you convert it into a bitmap halftone- if you scale down an image that already went through the halftone process it will become blurry and loose the effect.

2. Play with the Gaussian blur filter before and after you convert an image to a halftone screen, you can achieve some cool looking effects that further push the image.

3. Mix it up by using the original image along with the transformed halftone graphic to give your final image some depth and confusion. Also inverting the processed halftone image can yield some different results.

That’s it! I hope you enjoyed this brief tutorial on half-toning and bitmap effects in Photoshop. Stay tuned for more tutorials to come.

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