can anyone help with using the halftone palette please?

[Peter Normington]

Nick, you won’t see the results on screen.
you have to send it to the print and cut manager first, spool only, then view the data to get an idea of the output result

btw what sort of out put do want to achieve? the half tone dots are limited in size.
Peter

[David Rogers]

I hope this is what you are meaning about ‘dot patterns’. But this is not halftone as it contains only black or white.

Signlab wasn’t my first choice for rendering say a photo to a nice series of printable or cutable dots, at a size/scale that you want not just P&C manager sizes. I’ve had REALLY good results rendering in Photoshop at then exporting to Signlab to convert to vectors.

I’d post the link to the samples.htm page of my site….but it wouldn’t go down too well 🙁 so here’s a clip of a file I sampled

It was discussed at length a few weeks ago during a ‘rasterise’ posting.

[Nick Harper]

Thanks for your comments guys.

I would like to achieve results similar to the example shown by David.

If the dot pattern he created was achieved from a normal image, i would like to be able to do that.

A few tips on how to achieve this would be great, then i can experiment.

I only have photo shop 4 though, don’t know if this is a problem.

Thanks for your time
Nick

[David Rogers]

1. open image in PS
2. convert to greyscale IMAGE >>> MODE >>> GREYSCALE
3. increase image size (pixels) to be between 100 & 500 dpi (more=smoother)
4. FILTER >>> PIXELATE >>> COLOUR HALFTONE
5. Set MAX RADIUS to a suitable number (trial & error dependis on image size, resolution etc. But for the teacup I used 30)
6. convert image to bitmap – 50% threshhold
7. export / save image & ‘vectorise’ in your signage program. eg. Signlab.

Signlab trace settings need to be set for ’rounded’ rather than ‘sharp’ corners. Again, playing with the setting can get better results.

The sample below took me all of 4 mins – it took longer to type up this and post the image!….

ps. This is a REALLY rushed example – the AI vector is OK though.

[Nick Harper]

Cheers David, i would really appreciate that, – if only i could work out how to pm/email you

Nick

[Peter Normington]

nick are you looking to cut this sort of image? if so it only really works on quite a large scale.

Peter

[Nick Harper]

Hi Peter, I’m not really looking to cut the images, as i know it would be a nightmare.
I’m thinking i could print them onto clear film and make stencils out of them for our screen printing dept. Now i know that you can transform almost any image into a dot pattern, it opens up a whole new ball game.

I had a play around using David’s instructions and got some pretty good results.

I don’t get to use photo shop much as we work mainly with vectors. so it was very interesting.

Many thanks for all your input.
Nick