Halftone fades in CS

[Nate_Stevens@adobeforums.com]

I have seen a lot of illustrations with a gradient behind a main subject where the gradient is made up of large dot patterns instead of an airbrush type gradient. How is this done?

Now first, I know about the color halftone feature in Photoshop and I like it. Problem is I can't get a clean vector image to work with in Illustrator. I end up with this massive shape with about a million nodes composing it. When I manage to reduce the number of nodes, the circles no longer are round.

How can I get this where they are rounded but not taking forever to refresh from node overload?

[Scott_Falkner@adobeforums.com]

You could make the gradient in Photoshop as a grascale image, then convert it to a bitmap with a custome halftone dot patter. Place that in Illustrator and you can colour it to your heart's content.

[Nate_Stevens@adobeforums.com]

But that produces the same results that I don't want. They aren't smooth circles and they have a million nodes. The artwork I have seen look smooth.

[Scott_Falkner@adobeforums.com]

The resulting image with my suggestion has no "nodes". It is a bitmap image. And they are indeed smooth circles. Make your resolution high, like 600 ppi.

The only place where the dots aren't round (if you selected round dots) is near the 50% mark, where the pattern changes from black dots on a white background to white dots on a black background.

[Nate_Stevens@adobeforums.com]

Oh I see what you are talking about. Sorry for the confusion. I was just wanting this as a vector image to manipulate in Illustrator. I wanted to be able to enlarge it if I wanted to without having to go through a whole new round of bitmapping. Thus the need for good looking circles.

[Scott_Falkner@adobeforums.com]

It's been a while since I experimented with the Riders filters, but look in your manual or help files for information about Riders. I think you'll find the results of Riders are a bit flaky, as they require a PostScript device for output, can often be overridden by prepress workflows, and the angle is usually based on the device, not the file. This last one means if you used a horizontal line screen, you might end up with vertical lines in your output.

Try Effect->Color Halftone. Play with the angles, and start with a grayscale gradient only. If you want it colorized, then rasterize it first as a transparent bitmap and colourize that. And be sure to set your document raster efects setting high enough.

[Timothy_Foolery®@adobeforums.com]

I think you'll find the results of Riders are a bit flaky




Never had a problem with them and the fact that Riders have been left out of CS means it can't be incorporated into our work flow and no one will buy it for me. :(

I do print to a Adobe PS3 device though.