HALFTONE
☞ runs entirely in your browser — nothing is uploadedDrop your image here
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Halftone preview
OneImageTool
Free Image Tools
HALFTONE
Redraw a photo as a grid of black dots whose size follows the tone — the printed-newspaper look, straight in your browser.
or click to browse — JPG, PNG, WebP
Halftone preview
one dot per cell, sized by the ink
A printing press has one colour of ink and no way to make it lighter. The trick the trade settled on is to break the picture into a grid and put one dot in each cell: a big dot where the picture is dark, a small dot where it is light, nothing where it is white. Step back and the eye averages the dots into continuous tone. This filter does exactly that, in software, at whatever cell size suits the image.
The dot radius is the square root of the ink, not the ink itself. What the eye reads is the area a dot covers, and area grows with the square of the radius — feed the tone straight into the radius and every midtone comes out far too light. The cell size scales with the image as well, so that a phone screenshot and a full-frame photo both come back with dots you can actually see rather than a screen too fine to notice.
three steps
A JPG, PNG or WebP. Photos with clear light and dark areas give the most recognisable dot pattern.
The grid is sized from the image, so there is nothing to tune — the preview is the finished result.
Save as PNG. Halftone output is hard-edged black on white, exactly the kind of detail JPG compression blurs.
quick answers
A way of faking continuous tone with a single ink. The image is split into a grid and each cell gets one dot, sized by how dark that cell is. From a normal viewing distance the dots blend and you read grey.
A press rotates its screen so that four inks do not form a moiré pattern. There is only one ink here, so there is nothing to avoid, and an upright grid keeps the result predictable.
Not directly — it is derived from the image so the pattern stays visible at the size you will look at it. Resize the picture first if you want a coarser or finer screen: a smaller source gives proportionally bigger dots.
Because the dots have grown until they touch. A press does the same thing. Brighten the photo before applying the effect if you want the dots to stay separate.
No. A halftone varies the size of dots on a fixed grid; dithering keeps the dots the same size and varies how many land in an area, by scattering the rounding error. Up close they look quite different.
No. The picture is reduced to grey first and printed in one ink, which is what makes it look like newsprint.
No. The picture is decoded and redrawn inside your browser, and the download is built on this device. There is no server in this tool to receive an image.
Yes — free, with no watermark and no sign-up.