Halftone Patterns

TM
Posted By
The Magician
Jan 3, 2006
Views
390
Replies
2
Status
Closed
The transit system of my state has a tricolor stripe for it’s logo, and on some of it’s newer trains, the stripe runs horizontally across the engine, and ends in a diminishing halftone type thing. (rounds balls that descrease in size)
Which kinda makes it look like e a comets tail fizzling out. I never really got into halftoning, but tried to duplicate this effect, but just can’t figure out how.
Here’s sort of an exampe of the end of the trains stripe. This isn’t from the actual train, it’s just the closest thing I could find that sort of matches what ‘m talking about. And this example is going up and down… but you’ll get the idea.
Just picture it going right to left.

http://www.magentastudios.com/thumbnails/245.521059.jpg

How do you get dots like that to perfectly run in a straight row and perfectly diminish in size like that?
Whenever I use halftoning in PS…first off…it’s always in multicolors, and second…it’s al over the place…all different random sizes.
How do you control it?
Did the artist just simply go thru the painstaking task of taking a bunch of different sized circles, and lined them up?
Or is there some way of using halftone patterns or something? Any ideas, online tutorials, etc, about this would be greatly appreaciated.
Thanks!
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Mike Russell
Jan 3, 2006
"The Magician" wrote in message
The transit system of my state has a tricolor stripe for it’s logo, and on some of it’s newer trains, the stripe runs horizontally across the engine, and ends in a diminishing halftone type thing. (rounds balls that descrease in size)
Which kinda makes it look like e a comets tail fizzling out. I never really got into halftoning, but tried to duplicate this effect, but just can’t figure out how.
Here’s sort of an exampe of the end of the trains stripe. This isn’t from the actual train, it’s just the closest thing I could find that sort of matches what ‘m talking about. And this example is going up and down… but you’ll get the idea.
Just picture it going right to left.

http://www.magentastudios.com/thumbnails/245.521059.jpg

How do you get dots like that to perfectly run in a straight row and perfectly diminish in size like that?
Whenever I use halftoning in PS…first off…it’s always in multicolors, and second…it’s al over the place…all different random sizes.
How do you control it?
Did the artist just simply go thru the painstaking task of taking a bunch of different sized circles, and lined them up?
Or is there some way of using halftone patterns or something? Any ideas, online tutorials, etc, about this would be greatly appreaciated.

For a job like a train decal, the budget will be more than our annual incomes combined, so I’ll bet that every circle was laid out individually. But there are many ways to create this pattern relatively quickly.

Here’s one:
1) Create a custom pattern consisting of a circular gradient that is black in the center, and about 32 pixels square.
2) Convert a 768 x 1024 72ppi linear gradient to grayscale, then to bitmap. Specify halftone, about 1 line per inch, using your custom pattern. This results in a somewhat jaggy version of the pattern.
3) Convert back to grayscale or RGB. Then use gaussian blur followed by levels to clean up the jaggies.

Other ideas:
Make the circle somewhat larger than the square, so that the circles will overlap as shown in your example image. Instead of using halftoning, create a new layer over the gradient, fill it with your custom pattern, and experiment with the different layer modes for more original effects. Experiment with using Photoshop’s built-in halftone screens, and with other pattern shapes than circles – make sure your pattern has a good selection of gray values in it or the halftoning will be too abrupt.
—

Mike Russell
www.curvemeister.com
HL
Harry Limey
Jan 3, 2006
"The Magician" wrote in message
The transit system of my state has a tricolor stripe for it’s logo, and on some of it’s newer trains, the stripe runs horizontally across the engine, and ends in a diminishing halftone type thing. (rounds balls that descrease in size)
Which kinda makes it look like e a comets tail fizzling out. I never really got into halftoning, but tried to duplicate this effect, but just can’t figure out how.

I would imagine they used a drawing or illustrating programme, I created a pattern as per your illustration in no more than 5 minutes with Serif Draw (one of the cheapest drawing programmes) but I would imagine that Corel and Illustrator could do the same! And of course with a vector programme like that, the image is scaleable without loss of definition. As someone who is a regular on this forum is ‘wont to say’ if you are unscrewing screws, use a screwdriver!

Harry

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