Using the Colour Halftone Filter in Photoshop

This is the fourth video in the series on emulating traditional print techniques in Photoshop.

Colour halftone is not just a old technique it is very much alive in the modern print industry.

Printers use the CYMK colour space and so to truly emulate this print technique in Photoshop, it is necessary to work in CYMK mode.

The settings for the colour halftone filter do need to be tweaked for each image you work with. The yellow channel is most likely to present problems, but minor tweaks to any of the channels can be needed to remove or at least reduce unwanted patterns that frequently emerge after the filter is applied.

Never give two different channels the same angle. The key channel is usually the K channel which stands for black: this is the fourth channel in the filter. There is a preference among printers to giving this channel a 45 degree angle and usually you will want to respect this convention.