TUTORIAL | HALFTONE BLACK & WHITE PHOTO

If you, like me are taking part in the Month Of Challenges [MOC] at the Lilypad then you know all about the Ad Challenges that's hosted by Polly Celeste. If not then let me show and explain.

Celeste gave this gorgeous ad as an inspiration for the 22nd challenge of the MOC.

Amazing right?!!
Well it got me all inspired and my first goal was to try an mimic that sketched drawing with a photo of my own and I was SO pleased with how that turned out! Many people asked me to write at tut and tell how I did it. So....here we go.

I started with this photo. As you can see it has quite a bit of contrast and that will give you the best result with the method that I am using.

original photo

Then I converted the pic to black and white by going to the menu image > adjustments > hue/saturation.

photo converted to black and white

As you can see it's more grey and white then black and white so I tweaked it a bit to increase the contrast. For this I went to image > adjustments > exposure. The values in my tut can be used as a guideline but as each picture is unique you will probably have to play around with the sliders until you think it looks good.

increased contrast in exposure menu

Now duplicate that high contrast black & white photo 2 times you have 3 layers with the exact same photo on top of each other.

Set the 2nd layer to soft light. This will increase the contrast in my face even more.

soft light layer over increased contrast black and white photo

And now the magic comes. Go to your 3rd layer and add a halftone filter. For this you need to go to filter > pixelate > color halftone. Set the maximum radius to 12 [you may need to adjust that number to get the pixel size that best fits your image] the channels are all set to 1 because I am working with a greyscale image. If you want to use this effect on a color image then you can adjust the channels that correspond with CMYK.

3rd layer pic with a halftone filter added

You could use the halftone photo as is of course but I missed a bit of depth and definition. So what I did is I set this [3rd layer] to blend mode overlay and voilá!

halftone photo [3rd layer] set to overlay

That's my finished photo: 

• a black and white photo and on top of that 
• the same photo set to soft light blend mode and on top of that 
• again the same black and white photo as layer 1 with a color halftone filter used on it and set to blend mode overlay

Then I cropped it and this is what it looks like in my layout.

I hope you liked the tut and that you can put it to good use! Of course I would LOVE to see what you make so if you feel like sharing then by all means link me up to your gallery by leaving a link in the comment section if this post!