How on earth do I find the halftone tool in Affinity Designer 2 - Desktop PC

[mallard3000]

I could use some help. I would like to make a halftone pattern and apply it to my design on Affinty Designer 2. I have no idea where to start.

[walt.farrell]

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums, @mallard3000.

 Photo has a Halftone filter, but there's nothing like that in Designer as far as I know.

[Komatös]

Maybe not the solution you want, but try the following as a workaround.

 

[walt.farrell]

Good suggestion, @Komatös.

That will provide a set of Halftone Brushes (raster/pixel format) that can be used in the Pixel Persona of Designer. They won't be vector, but might be useful for the OP's purposes.

[Bryan Rieger]

4 hours ago, mallard3000 said:

I could use some help. I would like to make a halftone pattern and apply it to my design on Affinty Designer 2. I have no idea where to start.

If you're looking for vector halftones and are on macOS, my work arounds are to use Vectoraster and Drawbot. The former enables you to create halftones sheets at various sizes, gradients, etc and export to SVG which can then be used in Designer. Drawbot on the other hand is a Python script based tool which enables you to create halftone patterns (along with other things) that can be exported to SVG, PDF, etc. 

If you're looking for raster halftones the suggestions above are great.

If it's complex vector halftones (sampled from images, CMYK, etc) I unfortunately always have jump back to that other industry standard illustration tool and use an astute plugin. Hopefully this will make it into Designer at some point in the not-too-distant future.

[v_kyr]

For generating vector halftones & halftonings I often too use Python scripts and tools and then save the generated results as SVG.

• SVG_Digital_Halftoning

Or just generate some via NodeBox ans save those as SVG for reusage in ADe ...

• Vector Halftone Patterns With NodeBox: Initial Setup
• NodeBox

[Scungio]

Yeah, I recommend Vectoraster as well. You can't go wrong adding both Vectoraster and Patternodes from Lost Minds to your toolset. They are Mac only. 

While it would be great to have the Astute plugins for Designer, I find that Vectoraster, Patternodes and VectorStyler work well as companion apps to Designer. They are essentially my plugins for Designer that fill the gaps until Serif develops those tools and functions.

If I need to do halftones, I reach for Vectoraster. If I want to do complex repeating patterns, I reach for Patternodes. If I want to do a blend of two lines to get a quick flowing flag type of object, I reach for VectorStyler. VectorStyler also has an Image Trace feature and I am still grappling to learn it. While some may say, hey, that is additional cost in buying those apps, yeah, but if we had Astute Graphics plugins, they have gone subscription, so it would cost you a whole lot more money to the tune of $149 per year.

[Paul Mc]

I've recently had to do some halftone work and the workflow involved using Affinity Photo to prepare the image which included setting the levels and conversion to B&W with the addition of a Halftone filer. This is then brought into Affinity Designer for the other elements of the design o be added. Although there's no Halftone filter in AD, the filter from AP is preserved and is non-destructive until you export, at which point it is converted to a bitmap. Your document settings will define how that looks and there might be quite a difference from the vector image seen while editing so make sure you preview exports before going to print (assuming that's what you want to do).

This is in AD:

[lacerto]

You might also find the following post useful:

[Mordi]

I needed a halftone gradient, and found this thread. After some googling I came across this gem of a web tool:
https://halftone.xoihazard.com/

In my case, I uploaded a black and white gradient, and went from there. It lets you adjust point sizes and patterns. Saves either a PNG or an SVG for you. Super neat.

 

Edit: Another solution would be to use Inkscape, and then export an SVG from there.
https://logosbynick.com/halftones-inkscape/

[thomaso]

On 6/15/2023 at 9:17 PM, v_kyr said:

For generating vector halftones & halftonings I often too use Python scripts and tools

v_kyr, you might also like a solution with "Processing":

http://www.generative-gestaltung.de/2/  
–>    https://editor.p5js.org/generative-design/sketches/P_4_3_1_01