How to make a halftone effect

Comic-book CMYK dots, newspaper screens or one ink.

3 min read · Updated 2026-10-30

What it is

Halftone is how printing presses fake shades of grey with a single ink: they break the picture into a grid of dots, big where it is dark and small where it is light. From a distance your eye blends them back into tones; up close you see the pattern. Colour printing does the same with four screens — cyan, magenta, yellow and black — each at its own angle.

Designers use halftone on purpose because the dots carry a whole era with them: newspapers, comic books, pop art, screen-printed posters. Make the dots large and the picture becomes graphic, almost an illustration. Push the colours and you are in Roy Lichtenstein territory.

Where it is used

Halftone is everywhere in posters, editorial covers, comics-inspired social posts, merch and packaging, and it is one of the easiest ways to give stock photos a consistent, branded look: put the same screen on every picture in a campaign and they suddenly belong together.

Made in Paletoo with this mix:

A festival poster: the disco-ball photo in big CMYK dots under the headline.

A magazine cover: a pop-art screen behind yellow type.

A coffee roaster post: the barista cut-out printed in comic-book dots.

How to make it, step by step

Open your design and select the photo. Portraits and objects with clear light and shadow give the most readable dots.
Open the Effects tab and find Mixes; press All to see every one.

A magazine cover open in Paletoo, the portrait selected and the Mixes open
Press Halftone pop. Three steps go on: Basic lifts contrast and saturation, Halftone prints the picture as four colour screens, and Texture lays newsprint under it.

Halftone pop pressed: Basic, Halftone and Texture under Applied, the portrait printed in CMYK dots
Open the Halftone step. Size sets the dots, Angle turns the screen, Shape switches between Dots, Lines and Grid, and Screen chooses CMYK or One ink.

The Halftone step open: its presets and the Size, Angle, Shape and Screen controls
Its presets are a quick tour: Comic, Newsprint, Pop art, Engraved lines and Dot matrix, each also in CMYK.
Press Export. The dots are drawn at the export size, so they stay round and crisp even in a large print file.

Watch it

The one-click mix

In Paletoo the whole stack is one mix, Halftone pop. One click puts every step on the selected object, one undo takes them all off, and each step stays an ordinary effect you can change, reorder or remove.

Its steps: Basic Halftone · Pop art CMYK Texture · Newsprint

Open this mix in Paletoo

Make it your own

Choose the dot size for the distance people will see the design from. A poster on a wall can take big, bold dots of 12–20 px; a post on a phone needs smaller ones, or the face stops reading. Check it at 100 % zoom before you export.

For a classic newspaper look, switch the screen to One ink, pick black, and turn the angle to 45° — that is the angle presses use because the eye notices it least. For a two-colour screen print, set one ink and put a coloured background behind the photo: the dots print over it like ink on coloured paper.

Use Misregistration in CMYK mode to shift the colour plates slightly apart, the way a cheap press does. A little gives life; a lot looks like a 3D image without the glasses.