To make a halftone effect online, open your photo in Artfkt’s free browser demo and apply an effect from the Halftone collection. Use Halftone Dots for a one-color print look, or CMYK Halftone for the four-color, comic-book dots shown above. Set Screen size first, then balance light and dark with Ink gain, and export a PNG. Nothing to install, no account, and your photo stays on your device.

Try CMYK Halftone on your photo →

A halftone rebuilds a picture from a regular grid of dots. Dark areas get large dots and light areas get small ones, so from a distance your eye blends them back into shading. Newspapers, comics, and screen-printed posters have used this approach for a long time, which is why the look reads instantly as printed. This guide uses one balloon photograph throughout. Every image is a real Artfkt render, and each comparison changes only the setting it names.

1. Choose a photo with bold shapes

Halftone replaces fine detail with dots, so it rewards simple, readable shapes. Look for a clear subject against a plain or quiet background: a portrait against a wall, a piece of fruit, a skyline, or a few balloons against the sky. Strong contrast between subject and background makes the dots do the work for you.

A photograph of blue, red, yellow, mint, and pink balloons on curling ribbons against a pale blue sky with soft clouds.

The source photograph, cropped to 8:5. Photograph by bahareh moradian, used under the Unsplash License.

Busy photographs still work, but expect them to become pattern and texture rather than a clear picture. If the subject gets lost, crop tighter before changing any settings.

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2. Choose one ink or four

The Halftone collection gives you two starting points for a classic dot screen.

Halftone Dots prints the picture with a single ink on a paper color. It suits zines, gig posters, and graphic covers where you want one strong color. The color of the original photo doesn’t matter, only its light and dark.

The same balloons printed with dark navy dots on cream paper. The blue and red balloons are dense and dark, while the pink and mint balloons are faint dot patterns.

Halftone Dots with Screen size 0.012 and Ink gain −0.15. Ink and paper are the defaults: navy on cream.

Notice how the pink and mint balloons almost disappear. In one ink, they are close in brightness to the sky. If the shapes you care about are similar in tone, CMYK Halftone keeps them apart by color.

CMYK Halftone splits your photo into four dot screens, in cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, each printed at its own angle, like a color magazine or comic. That’s the version at the top of this page. Its overlapping dots produce the familiar pop-art look, and the balloons stay distinct because each color is carried by different screens.

To begin, follow the CMYK Halftone link or the Halftone Dots link, then choose your photo. The effect starts on the Document stack, so it treats the whole composition. Click the effect in the layer panel to open its controls in Active FX.

3. Set the screen size

Screen size sets the spacing of the dot grid, and it changes the image more than any other control. Set it before anything else.

Two matching close crops of a balloon edge in navy halftone dots. On the left, tiny dots form a smooth gradient. On the right, large dots make a bold, chunky pattern.

Halftone Dots at Screen size 0.006 (left) and 0.030 (right). Ink gain is 0 in both; nothing else changes.

Small screens keep more of the photograph and read as a subtle print texture. Large screens turn the picture into a bold graphic, where the dots themselves become the subject. A comic or pop-art look usually sits in between. Both examples above came from the same photo; only the grid spacing differs.

Always judge screen size at the size people will see your image. Dots that look bold full-screen may blend into flat gray in a small profile picture or thumbnail, while a coarse screen on a large poster can make the subject hard to recognize. Very fine screens blend toward average tone on purpose, rather than producing unstable interference patterns.

4. Balance light and dark with Ink gain

Ink gain grows or shrinks every dot at once. Raise it for heavier, darker shadows; lower it to open up the highlights and let more paper show.

The examples on this page use Ink gain −0.15. At the default of 0, the pale blue sky printed as an even field of medium dots that competed with the balloons. Pulling ink gain down left the sky mostly as paper, so the balloons stand out. If your background looks busy, lower Ink gain before trying anything else.

With CMYK Halftone, Black generation decides how much of the shared darkness goes into the black screen rather than being built from the three colors. Higher values give deeper, crisper shadows. Lower values make dark areas look like mixed color.

5. Choose your inks and paper

Halftone looks are as much about color as about dots. Every ink and the paper color are editable:

  • In Halftone Dots, try a single bright ink, such as red or blue on off-white, for a screen-printed poster. Use a dark ink on a colored paper for a moodier, two-tone look.
  • In CMYK Halftone, you can replace any of the four inks. Swap yellow for orange, or cyan for a teal, and the whole picture shifts while keeping the same dot structure. Changing the inks reinterprets the separation creatively; it does not produce a press-ready CMYK file.
  • Both effects have a Paper color. A warm cream feels like newsprint or an old comic; pure white feels cleaner and more contemporary.

Under Sampling, Round dots gives clean, circular dots. Detail lets each dot follow the shapes inside it, for a rougher, more irregular print.

6. Add an off-register print look

On a real printing press, color screens are sometimes slightly misaligned. That misregistration produces colored fringes along the edges, and it’s part of the charm of vintage comics and riso prints. Misregistration in CMYK Halftone moves the color screens apart; Registration direction chooses which way they shift.

Two matching close crops of the red balloon's edge in CMYK dots. On the left, the screens are aligned. On the right, a magenta fringe and stray yellow dots appear along the balloon's edge.

Left: aligned screens, as in the cover image. Right: Misregistration 0.015 with Registration direction 30°.

Keep it small. A little misregistration adds character along edges; too much makes the image look doubled. Check your subject’s most important edge, such as a face or a lettered title, while you adjust it.

7. Add text and export

For a poster or cover, add a Text layer from Add. To keep lettering solid rather than dotted, put the halftone on your image layer’s own stack instead of the whole Document: remove it from Document, select the image layer, and add the effect from Halftone. Then reapply your settings. The editable text guide explains how layers and their effects work.

Choose Export → PNG in the browser demo (Quick Export → PNG in the desktop app) to download your image. PNG preserves the hard edges of the dots better than JPG. The free demo supports layers without a count limit, including editable text, and export is included.

More halftone looks to try

The whole Halftone collection is in the free demo, so you can try these on the same photo:

  • Halftone Lines rebuilds tone with parallel ink lines that vary in width, for a line-screen print.
  • Crossed Screens crosses two variable-width ink screens into a woven printed texture.
  • Liquid Ink joins neighboring dots into flowing necks and pools of ink.
  • Risograph prints with two bright inks. Follow the risograph poster tutorial for a full walkthrough.
  • Photocopy gives a high-contrast, toner-speckled copy. See the photocopy effect tutorial.

If you’re deciding between dots and pixel patterns, the dithering vs halftone comparison shows both on the same poster.

Common questions

Can I make a halftone effect for free?

Yes. Halftone Dots, CMYK Halftone, the rest of the Halftone collection, and still-image export are all included in Artfkt’s free browser demo. There’s no sign-up. Open the demo and choose a photo.

Do I need Photoshop to make a halftone?

No. Artfkt runs the effect in your browser and gives you direct controls for screen size, ink amount, colors, and misregistration. You don’t need to convert color modes or set up separate filters.

Can I send the result to a professional printer as CMYK plates?

No. The result is a regular image that looks printed. It isn’t a set of press-ready color separations. If you need commercial printing, export a high-quality PNG and let your printer handle color conversion.

Why do my dots turn into flat gray when the image is small?

At small display sizes, each dot becomes smaller than a screen pixel, so the dots average out to gray. Increase Screen size until the pattern is visible at the size you plan to share the image.

When to move to Artfkt for Mac and Windows

The free demo is enough to make a finished halftone image. Artfkt for Mac and Windows is for building bigger work around it:

  • Save editable projects. Come back to a poster later and change the screen size or inks without rebuilding it.
  • Mask the treatment. Use masks to limit a halftone to part of the picture.
  • Combine with the full library. Mix halftone with every other effects collection, including Dither and Grain for more print textures.

Artfkt is a one-time purchase with no subscription, and includes all current collections and Artfkt 1.x updates. It requires an Apple Silicon Mac running macOS 13 or later, or a 64-bit Windows 10 or 11 PC.

Want dots in just one area? Learn how to apply an effect to part of an image using an Effects mask in the Artfkt desktop app.

Turn your photo into dots

Open CMYK Halftone and choose your photo →

Start with the defaults, then try one small and one large Screen size. Choosing between those two versions is the quickest way to find the look you want. For a painted rather than printed look, see how to turn a photo into a watercolor painting.

How the examples were made

The source is a 1600 × 1000 crop of the photograph credited above. Every image was rendered through Artfkt’s production engine at time zero with motion off. Unlisted settings use each effect’s defaults. Comparisons pair renders of the same photo cropped to the same region; the screen-size pair changes only Screen size, and the misregistration pair changes only the two registration controls. The recorded renderer was WebGPU; appearance can vary slightly by device and display size. The images are Artfkt effect renders.