Technical Tutorials — Halftone/Duotone.

This weeks technical tutorials with Tony/Koray had been particularly useful as it was just in time for me to learn about creating halftone and duotones for my own editorial using secondary images. For my magazine, Womanish, since I had not been able to create primary assets and a lot of the topic I’m analysing relies on the work of others, this means I’d be using a lot of secondary images, however, to somehow make these my own and fitting to the aesthetic and identity of my editorial, the design which is, halftone or duotone is a good photo-editing technique.

The tutorial had been pretty simple as Koray had begun by showing us how to create the halftone effect which is essentially what the art movement, Pop Art consists of. The first way around it was as simple as experimenting with the filter gallery and sizing of the dots/circles, where you can also play around with the radius and angles etc. Once done, you are able to colourise the effect using a clipping mask. Another way to get this effect which gives a much better and more detailed outcome is again to visit the filter options, select pixelate and then selecting halftone, this way had picked up more details in the original image and looked a lot better and closer to the aesthetic I’m intending to go for, and I’m looking forward to trying it out myself.

Another technique we were shown was duotone which again, I plan to use as a running aesthetic in my editorial. This however, would be the first step before adding the halftone effect above it. Duotone effect simply requires selecting gradient map, then add colour. Once more, Koray had shown a more complicated way of getting this effect that overall, did look better and this was to go under the channels tab, select one of the RGB layers that balance the shadows and highlights of the original image well, to copy this effect into the original layers/picture tab and then it is a matter of adjusting. Under layers, select adjustments, select a solid colour for the highlights of the image, once again select the original image to add another colour fill but this time for the shadows, and to make sure to go for a complimentary colour scheme.

Below is an image of model, Bella Hadid that I had sourced from Pinterest that related to the overall topic (Gender Discussion) of my magazine that I had practised these new skills on:

Some attempts at both halftone and duotone.

(27.11.20)