Artist's commentary
Anonymous asked:
do you apply screentones in ps or csp? can you recommend any good resources for applying tones digitally?
I use CSP to apply tones because it has an inbuilt screentone function.Here are the basics:
Here is a screentone and its settings. The canvas is 600 dpi.
Number of screen frequency controls the distance between the centers of the dots. High frequency - dots are closer to each other - more dots in the same area. Low frequency - dots are further apart - fewer dots in the same area.
Since there are fewer dots, the dots are bigger so that the value is the same.
Density - Use specified density: this is the default setting when creating screentones. Basically, density controls the value of the screentone. What it does is increasing/decreasing the size of the dots. The number of dots remains the same.
Density - Use color of image and Use brightness of image: these are the settings for converting an image into halftones.
In this example, the black bar is on a separate layer below the box.
For the Color setting, the screentones seem to affect other layers. For the Brightness setting, the screentones act like normal, that is the space between the dots is transparent. I’m not entirely sure about these settings because I haven’t use them much. If you know, please tell.
Reflect layer opacity
Off - Opacity of the layer acts like normal, the dots get more transparent as opacity is reduced.
On - The density of the screentone is reduced instead of transparency, dots get smaller as opacity is reduced.
Dot settings - you can choose between different type of screentones in the drop down menu.
Noise size and Noise factor are specific to Noise screentone. Noise size controls the size of the noise particles while Noise factor controls how stretched they are.
Angle and Dot position - Imagine that you’re working traditionally, you can rotate and move the screentone sheet as you’re pleased. These settings let you do that digitally. Pretty useful.
Posterization - I think this is a setting for converting images to halftone but I don’t use it so I don’t know what it does exactly.
Alright that’s all the settings for CSP screentone, I think, now here’s the kicker: screentones are not suited for digital viewing.
When the dots are too small to see, compression/resampling of the image may become a problem. Below is normal circle dot screentone compressed.
Doesn’t look too good. Fortunately, you can play with the angle of the screentone and change the compression artifacts. Below is the same circle dot screentone with a different angle.
Often I use a particle brush to add white noise to the tones to simulate printing artifacts. Sometime it looks nice, but at this point, this is more of a patterned gray rather than a halftone.
Last tip, if you’re layering tones of top of each other, keep their screen frequencies and angles the same if you don’t want funky moire patterns.
Alright, that’s all I got, hope it was helpful!
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