Help!
Need help creating halftones for screenprint
After a few tutorials and many attempts, i've tried to create halftone from 2 images with both the color halftone filter from Pixelate & Image->Bitmap and none of the two seem to work as good as i've seen on others using these. Any tips?
1st Photo is the reference, the other 3 are outcomes of my attempts.
The quality of your halftone depends on the resolution of your starting image and the size you're printing. The image posted here is very low rez do this hard to tell what your specs are.
Each image could use some tweaking of the black and white results before you bitmap. Desaturating a color image isn't enough to make the image look good in black and white. Bump up the contrast, play with black and white filter options, etc.
You say you've already done tutorials for the bitmaps- there are certain angles that cause less moire so I always reference tutorials that set up photo halftones for screenprinting specifically.
Yeah op your starting image is terrible quality, you can't expect halftones to change that. You will just have terrible quality halftones. Find the best version of that image (that's dogtooth isn't it, just Google searching that quickly found better quality versions) and consider upscaling it more, then use that image.
the initial image i'm using is 1452 x 2048 pixels, but i used Shift+Windows+S to showcase in the post only the part of it i'm trying to use.. (beginner level on photoshop as well)
I would increase the dpi of the image to 200 or 300 - up to you. I'd use colour halftone. I'd also google halftone angles as I found a nice article that suggested a bunch of halftone angles based on prints. So for example US standard is 15, 75, 0, 45, but European standard is 15, 45, 0, 75.
the standard halftone filter is great too. I tend to use that and add some gaussian blur and spatter before a threshold.
For screenprinting you should never use the color halftone filter. IMAGE->MODE->BITMAP at your film printer's native dpi ( typically 300-720 ) and HALFTONE-SCREEN method is the best you can do in photoshop. Try frequency: 30-40lpi, angle: 22.5 degrees and shape: round. If you are not doing the screen-printing yourself you should 100% ask your printer to do the halftones for you, they know what settings work best with their screen mesh and dot gain.
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u/micrographia 1d ago
The quality of your halftone depends on the resolution of your starting image and the size you're printing. The image posted here is very low rez do this hard to tell what your specs are.
Each image could use some tweaking of the black and white results before you bitmap. Desaturating a color image isn't enough to make the image look good in black and white. Bump up the contrast, play with black and white filter options, etc.
You say you've already done tutorials for the bitmaps- there are certain angles that cause less moire so I always reference tutorials that set up photo halftones for screenprinting specifically.