Halftone Studio
A free halftone and dither tool, built by Luis Ramirez. Turn any photo into print-style halftone dots in mono, CMYK, or RGB, then export a PNG. Free, runs in the browser, nothing uploaded anywhere.
Cramped in here? Open it full screen.
Halftone or dither
Halftone maps tone to dot area, so the radius grows with coverage and your highlights and shadows stay open instead of plugging up the way a naive filter blows them out. Dither takes the other road: it runs error diffusion (Floyd–Steinberg, Atkinson) or an ordered Bayer matrix on a downscaled buffer, then draws it back nearest-neighbour so the pixels stay chunky at whatever pitch you pick. One gives you the newsprint and screen-print feel, the other the 1-bit, early-digital feel.
Four ways to color it
Mono lays one ink on paper. CMYK does a real process separation at the classic 15 / 75 / 0 / 45 angles with subtractive multiply, so you get a proper rosette instead of a moiré mess. RGB flips to additive light on a dark ground, where the channels build back up to white for that digitized look. Palette reduces everything to a fixed set of swatches, with a knockout option that drops the darkest or lightest swatch to paper for softer screen-print and DTF output.
Dial in the tone
Screen frequency sets how fine the dots are. Independent gamma, white point, and black point let you model dot gain and keep the ends of the range exactly where you want them. Pick a dot shape, nudge the screen angle, invert the tone, and set the output resolution. When you like what you see, export a PNG; it honours a transparent background.
It all runs in your browser
Nothing uploads. Your image is read, screened, and exported entirely on your own machine, so there’s no server, no account, and your image is never tracked. Like the other tools here, it’s free and it’s meant to be useful, not gated.
Halftone questions
- What is a halftone?
- Halftone prints tone as dots of one ink that change size on a fixed grid. Bigger dots read as darker areas. This tool maps tone to dot area, so a 50 percent gray covers half of each cell.
- What does LPI mean?
- Lines per inch, the number of rows of dots per inch. Newsprint runs about 85 LPI, magazines 133 to 150, and screen printing usually 45 to 65. Higher LPI looks smoother but needs a finer output.
- What screen angles does CMYK use?
- Cyan at 15 degrees, magenta at 75, yellow at 0 and black at 45. Those angles make the dots form a rosette instead of a moire pattern. They are the angles this tool uses for CMYK.
- What is the difference between halftone and dither?
- Halftone changes the size of the dots. Dither keeps every pixel the same size and changes how many are turned on, using error diffusion (Floyd-Steinberg, Atkinson) or an ordered Bayer matrix.
- Can I use it for screen printing or risograph?
- Yes. Export a mono screen with a transparent background for each ink, then print each one as its own layer.
- Does it upload my image?
- No. The image is read, screened and exported in your browser. Nothing is sent to a server.