Hello and welcome back to another video my name is Mike Davies,
and in today's tutorial I'll be showing you how to create the halftone effect using GIMP. I'll be
using GIMP version 2.10.22 which is the latest version of GIMP at the time of this tutorial
Before I get into that don't forget to check out my website at daviesmediadesign.com. As
always I have tons of GIMP, Inkscape and Darktable tutorials on here. You can get more by becoming
a DMD Premium Member, and I have tons of free software help articles so definitely check that
out. You can enroll in my GIMP 2.10 Masterclass: From Beginner to Pro Photo Editing on Udemy. And
as I mentioned you can get more by becoming a DMD Premium Member, and I'll include a link to this as
well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video. I'll be using
this free photo from Pexels for today's tutorial - I went with the large download. Just click "free
download." Here is one example of what you can create with this effect, and here is a simpler
example. This is super easy to do in GIMP thanks to some built-in tools, so let's dive right in.
So here is my original photo. I opened this by going to File>Open and searching for the
image on my computer. Next I'll come over here and I'm going to duplicate the original photo.
And working on the duplicate I'm going to go to Filters>Distorts>Newsprint.
So there are a variety of settings you can use with this tool. I do go over them in more detail
in the premium version of this tutorial. But the most common way to use this filter
is to set the "Color Model" to either "white on black" or "black on white," and then come
down here to the tab under "black" and change the pattern here to "circle."
That's going to give you that sort of comic book or newspaper look. And you can use the "period"
or "angle" sliders to increase the size of the dots here and also change the angle of the dots.
So you want to find a happy medium here for the size because you don't want this to be too small.
Obviously that'll just make it white. And in this case it'll just show way too much detail,
in my opinion, and too large won't show enough detail. So find a good happy medium here - about
right there looks good. And the angle can be whatever you want, and you can also middle-click
on here with your mouse wheel and manually change this. So I could type for example "75" and ".00,"
or I can also use this option here - the little wheel. But if I hit the "enter" key that will
apply that angle. The "quality" is just to smooth out these circles a little bit. It doesn't really
do much in this case. It's supposed to emulate the way ink smears on newspaper, but it doesn't really
have that much of an effect here inside of GIMP. I recommend keeping this set to 16. And the effects
down here are mostly to add a little bit of turbulence or noise to this, so I don't recommend
using any of those. But once you're ready come over here and click "OK." And there is your basic
halftone effect. You can color in these dots to make them whatever color you want them to be
using a simple trick. And we can do that by going to Colors>Color to Alpha. So what this is doing
is it's turning the white background color to an alpha channel, or in other words it's converting
white to transparency. And so I'll come over here and click "OK," and now this is interacting
with the original photo below. But I can come down here, create a new layer, and it's already
named "white" because I did this earlier. I'm going to fill this in with white and click "OK."
So that brings back our white background. And what we've essentially done is separated the dots from
the background. Now I'll come back up here to the layer with the halftone dots. I'm going to lock
the alpha channel. And now I can convert these to whatever color I want - for example let's go with
a cyan color. So if I click and drag this onto here now these dots are cyan. I can also change
the background color, so let's come over here - let's go with magenta for one color, and we'll
change the background color to yellow. So we have magenta and yellow. Let's grab the gradient tool
and making sure this is set to "Foreground to background RGB."
And the shape right now I have set to radial. I can click and drag this
and that's going to give us a cool background color. So I'll hit the "enter" key.
And if we wanted this to be more visible we can come back up here
and change this to black again. So I'll reset my colors, click and drag black on here,
and there you can see the result of that. Alright so that's it for this tutorial hopefully you liked
it if you did don't forget to subscribe to my channel and click the bell icon to be notified
each time I have a brand new tutorial. You can also check out any of the links to my resources
in the description of the video, but thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.