New to Affinity -Two color halftone effect

[jrocker1967]

Hello All,

  I'm a former Freehand user (very proficient),..then Illustrator (never proficient!), and a bit of Photoshop as well (basic stuff, really),..and I'm hoping someone here can help me. So far,..I really love the Affinity software, but there are some things I cannot figure out or find the info on how to do what it is I'm trying to do. I want to do retro/psychedelic designs,..and I can't figure out for the life of me how I can do a two color halftone effect like the pic enclosed. I want to be able to pick the two colors like the orange and the pink as seen in the attached example, and be able to change them to find the two colors that work best for a particular design. I can't seem to be able to change the color of the positive part of the halftone from black -and also have it's negative portion be transparent to show the second color underneath -am I making any sense? Almost like a duotone -but where I can have two colors that are not from the same hue. The example I've attached should give you an idea of what I want to do. It's a Victor Moscoso poster, and he used two opposite colors on halftones like this a lot. Can anyone recommend how I would go about this? I would appreciate it very much. JH

[lacerto]

Hello @jrocker1967, and welcome to the forums!

You might find the following post interesting in trying to achieve the effect:

If you additionally wish the image to have halftone appearance, you might afterwards apply it a halftone effect in Photo.

These methods are not the same as halftone screens you could use in FreeHand or halftoning and using paletted images in Photoshop (as Affinity apps cannot apply true screens and does not support indexed image formats), but you should still be able to achieve similar aesthetic effects using the kinds of workarounds described e.g. in the referred post.

[Fixx]

Halftone filter can do this. It results though greyscale (or b&w) image so you have to colorize white and black to orange and red. Takes some fiddling with fill layers and blend modes. Surely there are other means for colorizing too. 

Text/glasses have to be separate layer as it is not halftoned.

[lacerto]

In context of Affinity Photo, you can simulate indexing effect by using the combination of Gradient, B & W and Posterize adjustments (note that by arranging the Posterize Adjustment above the B & W Adjustment you can have exact number of colors specified by the Posterize Adjustment; if the layer is below as in the screenshot, there would be intermediate, but still sharp edged tones):

indexing_w_posterize_bw_gradient.afphoto

If you're on Windows, you can use G'Mic plug-in to help you reduce the colors of the image with exact number of sharp-edged tones:

 

 

 

[Komatös]

Have a look here:

 

 

[GarryP]

Here’s a very quick attempt at what I think you want to do for the background – image and video attached.
The settings used in each filter/adjustment will need to be decided upon as necessary for your original image.

[Komatös]

With brushes you can achieve the half-tone effect more variably.

[jrocker1967]

Wow! Thanks everyone,..I will see which option works for me..I'm still in the beginning stages of learning Affinity,..but I appreciate the replies -thank you again! JH

[Komatös]

You are welcome!

[lacerto]

The following clip shows three ways to create a two-color halftone effect. 

The first method uses Black and White Adjustment to change colors to gray tones, Posterize Adjustment at specific point of the layer stack to specify exact amount of colors (to not allow midtones between the defined two colors), and Gradient Map Adjustment to define the two colors to be used in the manipulated image. Live effect Halftone in monochrome mode is used to simulate screen.

The second method uses Colormap filter of G'Mic plug-in to reduce the number of colors to 2 using adaptive quantization, but applies 100% dithering to simulate halftones. The two tones are colored by using LUT adjustment and picking the colors from a saved image. 

The third method uses actual CMYK separations as grayscale images and colors them using C, M, Y and K rectangles (but in RGB color space as not all adjustments work in CMYK color mode; color correction is used to adjust the color mode difference). Each color layer has also HSL Adjustment and Live Halftone filter applied. Halftone is achieved by using Photo Live Halftone filter which produces realistic enough screen effect. The colors are reduced once again by using a set of B & W, Posterize and Gradient Map adjustments. The third method is most complex but is included just to show that the angled dot screens produced by the Live Halftone filter can be useful to create quite realistic CMYK separated sharp edged RGB/8 screens in software that lacks internal support for producing monochrome screens and manipulation of paletted images, or sending screened output to PostScript printers, so even if these files could not probably be used as a replacement for real thing, the aesthetic effect can nevertheless be achieved.

 

 

[jrocker1967]

Hey Everyone 

I'd like to thank you all for taking the time to help me. It turns out that I found a plug-in that can really help with what I'm trying to accomplish,..so I went ahead and purchased it. It's called "Halftone Processor" from The Vector lab,..and it seems like an easier way to do this type of effect. The link is below for anyone who's interested. Thank You again! JH

https://thevectorlab.com/products/halftone-processor?variant=40048092151893

and here's a video link showing what it can do:

 

Edited July 28, 2022 by jrocker1967
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