How to make a Halftone effect

Support Compositing and Post Processing
#1

It’s a bit retro and possibly cheesy but I like the graphic feel of dot and line screened images creating a halftone.

Screening a photo is the process of reducing the resolution of an image into printable pixels or dots.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halftone Newspapers and magazines use a fine screen to print a series of colors onto a page. In my case I chose to screen only a luma value image. You can vary the contrast and the size of the dots. In my case I also created 3 types of screen.

-Dot
-Line
-Line at 45degrees

Heres is a screeney of my setup with results:

print screen effect.jpg1541×969 392 KB

Dot Screen.blend (506 KB)

UPDATE**

And here is a break down of the more elaborate version!

#2

Wow, that is a really cool effect :smiley: thanks for sharing, I need to check this out

#3

Haha, the hardest part was trying to create the 3 demo images at the bottom. Why cant I just freeze the output from a render result or viewer node?

#4

Errr… What about going to the UV/Image Editor and selecting “Viewer Node” as image? From there you can save the current backdrop of the Compositing node tree. The feature is available in 2.65. (Don’t know or remember about previous versions.)

#5

Agreed, I use the viewer node to generate images for textures: just use viewer node as output in image editor, then F3 over image editor window and save image to file.

#6

Which is what I finally did, but why can’t I just add different images to the render buffers? Problem is that you cannot have multiple versions of the render result up showing alternate slots. But sure save/load/display works too.

#7

Hey 3point, that’s super cool! :slight_smile:

#8

Is the node scene available in the blend file? Can’t check as I’m on a bus but someone on YouTube couldn’t find it.

#9

Yes, they need only to switch to Compositing view instead of Default

#10

Make sure you select a different slot before you render and then close your render window or just render again. You can have up to 8 renders and you can change from one to another using J.

#11

Oh I see, I had all three windows open on different slots but couldnt get any to stick. I think that the project made my brain mush before rendering…

#12

You can also make two uv editor windows and load each render (=slot) on one of them.
More often than not, however, I find myself going to the compositor and using the mix–>difference node or the split viewer node to see what actually changes between renders. Depending on the context, I tend to trust that more than just looking at the renders! :slight_smile:

#13

Hey there, here’s a color version!
R G B separation

RGB halftone.jpg1570×831 373 KB

color dots.blend (628 KB)

The dot size can be increased but you need to vary the blur factor too. But I haven’t linked them here.

#14

there really should be a ‘rate this thread’ option for this type of forum as well - ***** from me, 3PointEdit

#15

:smiley:
…

#16

halftone effect enhanced.blend (773 KB)New and improved, but needs some comic book captions?

#17

Really nice work!

#18

Thanks for that, the masking took the longest time! I hate roto, and it’s not even a hard one! :stuck_out_tongue:

#19

This is truly amazing! :slight_smile:
+1 for a sticky thread!

The great thing about Blender is that you don’t just rely on pre-made effects, you can create your own.
And if you take the time to grasp the underlying concepts and experiment a bit, boy doesn’t that unleash creativity or what?

#20

I suppose I will have to do a tut and put it up on the blog? I wonder if the nodes preset addon will turn it into a button click effect, be handy for applying it multiple times.