Halftone Patterns

A graphic effect that has almost always been popular is the halftone pattern. Of course, it's real purpose isn't too be cool looking. It's real purpose is to have a pure black and white image (not grayscale) that has some depth. If you were to look at any black and white newspaper image really closely, you'd see this pattern every time, because every photo is just printed with black ink. Unfortunately, this is one of those photoshop effects that is highly abused by amateur designers, and I'm going to do you a favor and tell you how to do it right.

For whatever reason, the Photoshop halftone filter (located in Filter>Sketch>Halftone Pattern) does not create an appropriate halftone pattern, despite the fact that the program is completely capable of creating one. The filter just applies a blanket dotted mess over your image. It makes it look vaguely halftone-ish, but it is clearly full of gray values while a proper halftone is only black and white. Here is an example of a halftone filter (on the left) and a proper bitmap (on the right):

See what I mean? The image on the left is just a dotty gray image, while the image on the right is a try halftone. Since this is an effect that I am quite fond of (hence my use of it on my header), I'd like to tell you how to do it right:

First, convert your image to grayscale and make sure you give it a healthy amount of contrast. Then go to the Image menu, then to Mode and to Bitmap. On the pop-up menu, under Method, select Use: "Halftone Screen...". Then on the next pop-up, to achieve the more 'classic' halftone effect, set your Angle to 45 select Shape: 'Diamond'. For all of the other numbers, you are going to have a play around. It isn't easy to get perfect results, which is why I don't understand why Adobe wouldn't just build this into the Halftone filter (so you could preview your results while adjusting numbers), but, they didn't, so deal with it.