Screentoning in photoshop

Inactive artblog is inactive. So have another tutorial. This one circling around halftones/screentones. There’s a million ways to do this, but I’m just showing you guys the way I use most.

Prepping art. Treat your tonework the same as you would treat your colored work in photoshop on a separate layer from your lineart. You should do perfectly fine using 1-2 layers just on tone work.

Make sure you work in grayscale. You’ll tell from the later steps if you are or aren’t. And you can’t change if afterwards else it’ll cause a moire effect.

Much like you would with color work, select with the magic wand area. This case, I selected the hair. I expand my select area to make sure I don’t have a awkward halo effect in the grays. Expanding 1-2 pixels works fine.

Fill in the area with grays. The Darker the grays the the darker the tone.

The pixelate window is where will be doing the majority of tone work. The two options used the most is “Color Halftone” and “Mezzotint” Will go into halftone first.

In the halftone window you can choose the size and dot angle. The “Max. Radius” section you can change and control how fine your tonework can be. Larger the number, larger your dots. Screen angles I usually leave alone. After you decide on a radius, hit okay.

Tumblr does a great job making that work look like it’s for nothing so just click here for a full view.

Now For Mezzotint

Doing the same steps above, I fill with grays. You can do this on the same layer with no problem. Or you can choose to use a separate layer for each effect.

This time going into mezzotint we’ve have a list a chooses. Each one does have nice tone results so I would check them all out. I’ll just stick with “Fine dots” to make a noise texture.

Full View

For the most part, that’s it. You can do the same thing with patterns, gradients and images or you can invert (cmd+i/ctrl+i) for invert tones. While it’s true you could download patterns to do the same thing, some patterns might be of low resolution and won’t give you the look you want personally.