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Two Tone Halftone Tutorial by jimiyo

I saw this (above) Marc Ecko design the other day. I’ve been seeing halftoned photograph models/objects being incorporated into illustration designs more often these days, so I wanted to share a tutorial on the technique.

I grabbed the stock photo above from Infidem on Deviant Art for the purposes of this tutorial.

Let’s Begin!

1. Isolate and cut out the image you want to halftone onto it’s own layer from the source.
There are many ways to cut out an object from a photo. You can use quick mask, pen tool for clean masks, quick selection tools, magic lasso, levels. Different tools for different problems. I recently found this great tutorial on the new CS5 quick selection tool, which I found to be useful for images that require detailed selections like hair. Otherwise I use quick mask and pen tool to make shape selections.

2. Make a white layer under the cutout. (Keep a copy of the original under the white layer just in case you mess up.)

3. Make a duplicate of the cut out. (CTRL-J) and desaturate the duplicate layer. (CTRL-SHIFT-U)
4. Using levels (CTRL-L) move the manipulators for the input histogram to increase the contrast and blow out all the non black details like the skin tone. The end goal for this step is to isolate the darkest parts of the image and rid the non-black details.

This step assumes you know how to utilize levels. Moving the white manipulator to the left takes the lighter parts of the image and adds more white essentially blowing out the white. Moving the black manipulator to the right makes the darker parts of the image and adds more black. Once the two manipulators meet, you should have an all black and white image.

5. Set the layer (CUTOUT1 Copy) to Multiply Layer Mode.

6. Desaturate the main image layer. Using levels again on the main image layer (CUTOUT1) move the manipulators for the input histogram to blow out most of the skintone, but not all of it. The end goal of this step is leave some of the gray areas which will be converted into halftones. You might need to come back to this step, because your halftones depends on how you handle the levels.

7. Run a Color Halftone Filter on the aforementioned layer. FILTER > PIXELATE > COLOR HALFTONE

Make sure to have all the screen angles the same for all channels.

You may have to play with the pixel size on this step. The smaller the pixel size, the more detailed and realistic it will look. The idea of this technique is to purposely create a halftone pattern aesthetic so you will want to choose a larger pixel size so it gives it that look. It will depend on your image resolution.

8. Once you have achieved a desire halftone pattern, increase the contrast/brightness of the newly halftoned layer to differentiate between the black. See the images below as an example.

9. Viola. That’s pretty much it. Throw some stock vector on and around it, and call yourself a designer/artist!

Thanks for reading!

Until next time: Be Good. Do Good. Spread Good.
;j