The first thing we’re going to do is use the standard-issue Photoshop color halftone filter. Now, this filter, on its own, produces some eye-searingly awful effects and gets overused in lousy internet art. We’re not going to fall victim to this, though! We’re going to use it as a mere stepping-stone on our path to glory!
Okay, down to business. Simply select the cyan, magenta, and yellow channels from the channels pallette, then go to the Filter/Pixelate/Color Halftone menu. Click on it, and you’ll see this dialogue box:
I set the Max. Radius to 6 pixels, which is just about right for the size we’re working at. You may want to play with this setting a little bit to get a size you’re happy with. I think Photoshop’s default is 8 pixels. Click OK and you’ll get th
is result:
But it still looks lousy, doesn’t it? Dreadful! Let’s do something about that!
The first thing to do is to knock everything a little off-register. “Off-register” refers to the way old-fashioned printing plates would slip a little bit, so the various colors wouldn’t line up with one another correctly. It’s an easily reproducable effect in Photoshop.
Go over to your channels pallette, and select just one of the color channels (but not the black layer!) You can click on the little eye next to the “CMYK” channel if you’d like to see how everything looks together, but you’ll only be able to affect the one channel you’ve selected. Now, select the entire image using command-A (or CTRL-A, if you must use a PC) and select the move tool. It’s the one in the upper right-hand corner of your tools pallette. Now, just use the arrow keys to nudge your colors a little bit off. Repeat for each of the colors, and you’ll end up with something kind of like this:
Of course, we’re still not done, and this looks kind of lousy still. We’ve got to do something about that background.
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