Creating a Halftone Screen Effect

This is a neat effect you can use if you want to give a shape the appearance of a coarse Halftone. This tip will show how you can make some Halftone patterns using FreeHand's Tile fills, but for creating Halftones to mimic actual photographs, it's best to use PhotoShop as it has a great Halftone filter to use.

Version: Any

Halftone Screens are used in printing to reproduce the images you create in programs such as FreeHand or PhotoShop. The images are broken up into a bunch of tiny dots that vary in size and color. The example at right is what an enlarged 4-color Process halftone would look like. Each color is printed at different angles to re-create the images on paper. Smaller dots create lighter colors and larger dots create darker colors. Below I show how I created this pattern, then I show how you can get other neat Halftone effects from your art.

The first step is to create the colored halftone "dots" that you'll be using in the Tiled filled objects. These can be any color, but for this example, I chose the process 4-colors (Black, Cyan, Magenta and Yellow). Just create a constrained square of any size, this will be the bounding box for the Tile. Then in the square, create a constrained circle of any size. Fill this circle with one of the colors, then repeat this step for the remaining colors like shown above. Next remove any lines from the squares so you don't see them in the Tiled fill later. Then select and Group each colored dot with it's bounding square.

Select the first halftone "dot" and Copy it. Next create the shape to have the Halftone screen effect. In the Fill Inspector, choose Tiled as the type. Then press the Paste in button and you should see the dots appear in the shape like shown above. In the Inspector you can change options such as the Angle, Scale and Offset values for the pattern. Above I scaled the pattern down and changed the angle to match real Halftone screens from the very first example at top.

Select the next halftone "dot" and Copy it. Next Clone the original shape and in the Fill Inspector, press the Paste in button. You should see the color change in the Tiled pattern. Then change the Angle of the pattern so you can see the original pattern underneath.

Repeat those steps for the remaining color dots you may have and your pattern should look something like the above example.

The options don't stop there either. You can modify your colored "dots" to be various sizes so the spacing of the Tiled fill varies. Like the above example, I made the Cyan and Black dots bigger so they fill in more space.

Now for something a little bit different. What if you want to have various sized dots in the halftone Tile fill? That's easy with Blends. In the above example, I used the same colors but blended two larger dots on the outside with one smaller dot in the middle. I can now copy and use these in my Tile fills.

Once applied to various stacked shapes, they create a crazy halftone image that could be used for a retro type of design.

Now for creating Halftone screens of art you've already created in FreeHand, you can use Adobe PhotoShop to render some quick halftone effects. Above I've imported the logo into PhotoShop and applied the Filter -> Pixelate -> Color Halftone filter. After that I can save it and reimport into FreeHand.

Example File Download (v7 format) Macintosh Stuffit File fhsource_halftone.sit Windows Zip File fhsource_halftone.zip