From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

754 Adding a monochrome halftone effect

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

754 Adding a monochrome halftone effect

- [Instructor] In this movie, I'll show you how to add a monochromatic halftone effect as we're seeing right here, and we'll be doing so using the standard color halftone filter, which has been part of Photoshop for decades, now. The thing is, that filter produces a different pattern on each color channel, so in other words, it produces a full color effect. I'm going to show you how to make it monochromatic. Alright, so, first thing we want to do is select the skull layer, the one that reads ID 913 et cetera, and I want to restore its opacity value to 100%, so, with my rectangular tool selected, which you can get by pressing the M key, just tap the zero key in order to reset that opacity value, and now, I want to apply color halftone as an editable smart filter, so I'll right click inside the image window and choose convert to smart object. Next, you want to go up to the filter menu, choose pixelate, and then choose this guy right here, color halftone. I'm happy with the maximum radius of six pixels. That's going to work out nicely, and all these angle degrees are just fine. Now, notice that these options read channel one, channel two, channel three, and channel four. This image is an RGB file, so channel one is red, channel two is green, channel three is blue, and there is no channel four, at which point, I'll go ahead and click okay to accept that change, and you can see that we end up getting some very colorful dots, indeed, and to make things even more apparent, I'm going to change the blend mode back to normal, because I really want you to see what's going on, and to save a little bit of room here inside the layers panel, I'll right click on this empty filter mask and I'll choose delete filter mask. Alright, now I'm going to switch over to the channels panel so that we can see if I switch to the red channel, that we have a single set of dots. We also have a single set of green dots, as well as a single set of blue dots, here inside the blue channel, but as soon as we look at the RGB composite, we've got a lot of colorful dots going on. Alright, now I just want one set of dots, and the dots I like best are those inside the red channel, so I'll go ahead and switch back to the RGB composite, switch back over to the layers panel, go up to the layer menu, choose new adjustment layer, and then choose channel mixer, and I'm going to call this guy red only, and then I'll go ahead and click okay. Then, here inside the properties panel, you want to turn on the monochrome check box. Notice by default that we're merging the red, green, and blue channels, and as a result, we hae some very mushy dots, indeed. What I want to do is see the red dots and the red dots only, so I'll change the red value to 100%, and then I'll tab to the green value, take it down to 0%, and set the blue value to 0% as well, and now we're seeing the red dots and nothing more, at which point, we can go ahead and hide the properties panel. Alright, now I did make a little bit of a mistake. I want this channel mixer layer to affect just the layer behind it, and so, I'm going to turn it into a single clipping group by pressing the alt key, or the option key on a Mac, and clicking the horizontal line between those two layers, like so. Then, you want to switch back to the skull layer, go ahead and change its blend mode to multiply, press the escape key here on the PC in order to unstick the blend mode popup menu, and then type two sevens in a row in order to take the opacity value down to 77%. Finally, I want to create a little bit of an interaction between the halftone dots and the original image, and so, notice this little slider icon over here to the right of the words color halftone, go ahead and double click on it in order to bring up the blend options dialog box and change the mode to screen in order to produce this brighter effect right here, and then, go ahead and click okay, and just to make things clear, this is the effect before I applied the screen blend mode, and this is the effect after, and that is how you add a monochromatic halftone effect using a combination of a color halftone smart filter along with a channel mixer adjustment layer.

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