How to Make Halftone Effect Patterns and Brushes in Photoshop and Illustrator

Final product image — What You’ll Be Creating

In this tutorial, I’ll show you what halftone is and how to achieve a halftone effect. I’ll also show you how to make your own halftone brushes.

What Is Halftone?

You might be familiar with halftone patterns being used in printing. While the pattern is essential for that specific medium, halftone patterns also give a unique look to design work. Halftone is a technique that simulates tone gradations by using dots. These dots vary in size, spacing and sometimes even shape to generate a halftone gradient effect. The closer and bigger the dots on the halftone, the darker the image is. The smaller and more spread out the dots are, the lighter the image is. When it is all put together, the halftone effect creates the illusion of gradation when seen from afar.

Nowadays, halftone is commonly used digitally to achieve a comic-book look, representing nostalgia for the past in the digital age.

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to achieve a halftone effect in Photoshop. You can apply these steps to any image of your liking to achieve a black and white halftone and color halftone. We will also take a look at how to create your own halftone brushes in Photoshop, which can help you add great details to your artwork. Lastly, we will look at how to create halftone brushes in Illustrator. This is perfect if you are getting started in the illustration world and want to develop your skill and style.

In a hurry? We’ve got amazing halftone textures and halftone vectors over at Envato Elements and GraphicRiver. Go check them out!

Follow along with us over on our Envato Tuts+ YouTube Channel:

What You Will Need

You’ll need access to Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator; if you don’t have the software, you can download a trial from the Adobe website. You’ll also need this image:

Headphones isolated on white background

Download the image, and when you are ready, we can dive in!

1. How to Make a Halftone Pattern in Photoshop

Step 1

Drag the Headphones isolated on white background image into Photoshop. We will convert this into a variation of halftone images to try different settings.

To achieve a color halftone in Photoshop, go to Filter > Pixelate > Color Halftone.

drag the headphones image into adobe photoshop and apply the color halftone filter

Step 2

In the Color Halftone option window, you’ll notice the Max. Radius and Channels options. Max. Radius dictates the maximum size of the dots, which will dictate how detailed you want your image to be. The bigger the dots, the less detailed it is; the smaller the dots, the more detailed it will be.

The Channels represent cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, and the angle these colors will get mixed in. This is to achieve specific colors and tones. The angle creates moiré effects and rosette patterns that are useful for printing when halftoning is necessary. In this tutorial, we will focus on the look of halftone effects that can be printed or used digitally as a style.

The Color Halftone option window has default settings. Mine are set to the following:

Max. Radius 8 pixels
Channel 1: 108
Channel 2: 162
Channel 3: 90
Channel 4: 45

Click OK.

In the example below, you can see that we’ve created a color halftone in Photoshop. The closer and bigger the dots are, the darker the image is, and the smaller and more spread out, the lighter the image is. The image is very textured due to the low Max. Radius. Look at the image from afar, and you’ll notice that the dots disappear, lending a tone gradation illusion.

headphones image with the default settings halftone

Step 3

Press Command-Z to go back a step. Go to Filter > Pixelate > Color Halftone. Let’s try the halftone effect with a different Max. Radius setting:

Max. Radius 20 pixels
Channel 1: 108
Channel 2: 162
Channel 3: 90
Channel 4: 45

Click OK.

You’ll notice the dots are much bigger, and you can see the CMYK color mix as a scattered pattern.

Step 4

Press Command-Z to go back a step. Go to Filter > Pixelate > Color Halftone. Let’s try the halftone effect with the same Max. Radius setting as above and changing the channels to 45:

Max. Radius 20 pixels
Channel 1: 45
Channel 2: 45
Channel 3: 45
Channel 4: 45

Click OK.

You’ll notice the dots are the same size but the angles are lined up on a grid, creating a neat pattern.

headphones image with all channels at 45 degrees

Step 5

Press Command-Z to go back a step.

Another way of achieving a halftone effect is by using the bitmap option. With the bitmap option, you can create a black and white halftone effect and use different halftone shapes. This technique will maintain the edges of the image as a cookie-cutter to create the halftone pattern. In order to access the bitmap option, we need to turn the image to grayscale.

Head over to Image > Mode > Grayscale, followed by Image > Mode > Bitmap.

convert the headphones image to grayscale

Step 6

In the Bitmap option window, set the Output to 72 Pixels/Inch. Under Method, Use: Halftone Screen and click OK.

convert the image into bitmap under method use halftone screen

In the Halftone Screen option window, set the Frequency to 3 Lines/Inch, the Angle to 45 degrees, and Shape to Round. Click OK.

You’ll notice in the image below that compared to the Halftone Effect, this instead cuts out the dots on the edge.

set the frequency to 3 angle to 45 and shape to round Click ok

Step 7

Let’s say you want to achieve a different kind of halftone effect. Press Command-Z to go back a step.

Go to Image > Mode > Bitmap. In the Bitmap option window, set the Output to 72 Pixels/Inch. Under Method, Use: Halftone Screen and click OK.

Let’s use the same settings, but this time change the Shape to Line. Click OK. By the traditional definition, this isn’t exactly halftone because it is not composed of dots, but it has the same idea. We are creating a halftone gradient with the lines.

Headphones image with the shape option set to line