Halftones and Reduction: A tutorial on how to utilize halftones and compositional changes to reduce overall design color count.

Griggtee submitted this design for consideration to Teefury.

Since Teefury only prints a maximum of six colors, he requested feedback on how to reduce the color count.

The need to reduce colors in a design occurs often in the apparel industry. More colors printed on a shirt increase the overall production cost as well as production time.

With basic techniques utilizing halftones and eliminating unncessary colors, a designer can easily reduce the overall cost of production and offer added savings value to the client.

COMPOSITIONAL ADVICE

Shirts are like street signs, to be effective, they need to be impactful, easily read, and understood by a wide audience.

When designing a shirt, you want the viewer to know exactly what is happening within seconds of seeing it.

Let's take a quick look at the design.

Although the secondary characters of He-Man cartoon add more content to the composition, they are not required for the concept of the shirt to be realized by the audience.

By eliminating the secondary characters, we are able to reduce the color count, and make it easier to read the whole design. We have three main icons associated with He-Man: Grayskull, He-Man, and Skeletor. Less to read, but you still get the joke.

To add more dimension, I recommended an increase Skeletor's size to match the implied horizon line.

I also recommended grayscaling He-Man as he is comprised of many colors. It also provided a solution in this composition as it gives the illusion that he is in the shade of the castle enclosure. It is unfortunate to lose the warm red colors since it is easily recognized as the main colors of He-Man. Still it works. (Another variation would be to grayscale the castle, reintroduce the red and yellow. We may still explore that option later on.)

REDUCING COLORS

One of the easiest ways to way to reduce the ink count is by using halftones to emulate like colors.

A similar technique is screening down. This involves using halftonesfading into the shirt color to create the illusion of an additional ink color. This technique is much more effective and easier on light colored designs since there is no base white.

These techniques will be effective in reducing the Castle Grayskull.

Isolating the castle, we can see that it is four shades of green. That makes me want to KEYBOARD SMASH. INEFFICIENT! FACEPALM!

First let's reduce the colors in the castle.

The two darkest green shades are very close in value. You can see that if you elimate the darkest green, the composition still maintains dimensionality. It does help, so let's use halftones to emulate a dark green.

Black ink is already present in the design. We can use black halftones over the second darkest green shade to emulate a darker green.

First let's save the selection of the darkest green which is now shown in red. Essentially, the red section shows the area which we will introduce a black halftone pattern to create the illusion of a darker green without actually using a dark green color.

Save the selection and put it aside.

Let's take a COPY of the version with all green shades, and grayscale the data. To grayscale the image, use Desaturate.

When converting an image to halftone, the darker the grayscale data, the more saturated the halftone pattern will be. The lighter the grayscale data, the less saturate the halftone pattern will be. This is fundamental to understanding how halftones are created.

We only want to add a slight halftone pattern of black to the green as the difference between the darkest green and second darkest are slight.

Using levels we eliminate all the areas we dont want halftones (which would be where the gray value exists), and also reduce the darkness of the gray in the target area to be very light. Target area is area we had previously highlighted in red.

The value of the gray will determine the halftone pattern density. How do you know how dark or light to create the gray?

It takes trial and error and experience. There is no easy solution.

Let's see what this grayscale will turn into.

1. You must convert the image to Grayscale Mode. To do this, go to IMAGE > MODE > GRAYSCALE

You don't care about it flattening the image. Your choice, flatten or don't flatten. Quit? Don't quit? Noodles? Don't noodles?

2. Once in Grayscale Mode, you will now convert to Bitmap. To do this, go to IMAGE > MODE > BITMAP

a. It will prompt you for OUTPUT. Typically the OUTPUT is the same # as the pixels/inch.

b. It will ask for FREQUENCY, ANGLE, and SHAPE.

These numbers typically depend on the mesh screen that your screen printer uses, but a safe combination would be 40/30/Round.

The smaller the FREQUENCY, the larger the halftone pattern dots. Play with this number. You can arrive at some very interesting patterns by using low numbers in the teens. Typically though it would be beneficial to stay from 40-55. Professional level printers with automatic machines can handle 55 easy. Hand pressed machines might have difficult time getting clean halftones with high frequencies.

The halftoned grayscale image looks like this.

We need to grab the b&w hlaftoned image and combine it with the previous RGB color version.

1. Select all, and COPY the halftoned version into the clipboard.

2. Undo/Step Backwards in History to the original RGB version of the image.

3. Paste the halftone black and white version of the image into the top layer of the design. If you want to test what it looks like, you can set the mode of the B&W halftone layer to multiply.

Below is the original version of the image with 4 shades of green next to the version with 3 shades of green AND the halftone pattern set to multiply.

Viewed from a distance, the halftone pattern gives the illusion of a darker green.

To tidy up the halftone reduction process for the darkest green, we just have to isolate the black halftone dots by using the selection we saved in red earlier and merge it into the design.

This section of the tutorial should have given you a basic idea on how to utilize halftones to reduce the color count for non-essential colors in a design.

In the next section/tutorial we will cover "Screening Down" which is a similar process that involves using halftones blending into the shirt color to create the illusion of another color.