Making charcoal-y/stipple-y looking shading. I see it a lot on here...help!

[Biklops]

Hi all!

So, I see this effect a lot--basically a charcoa- esque shading on something. I do it sometimes by making a halftone of gradient and then pasting it back in but I'm wondering if there is an easier way, especially when I see it used to just "edge" something--almost looks like a Photoshop brush. Here's what I'm talking about:



and this is really weird:



Can anyone think of an easier way to get that "stippled" look than what I described?

[danstiles]

gradient to bitmap set as a diffusion dither will do it, but it will more even than the examples above

[Biklops]

That's funny, that's what I've been doing today to try and cop this look. You can see my version here: Dribbble - Plastic Rainbows by Jeff Immer

Problem is it's too fine. Very tiny dots and diffusion doesn't seem to let you pick your dot size like halftone would. I want something rougher looking.

[lil_tuffy]

I do mine by making a gradient, usually in Illustrator. Export to potato shop and fuck around with add noise, pixelate, thresh hold etc. and then 50% threshold bitmap.

[matthewthirteen]

Gradient. Take it out of the computer and fuck with it. Bring it back in.

[loco]

use real charcoal on paper and scan that in

-loco

[SFPrinter]

Diffusion Dither in Photoshop is file size dependent. If your grayscale scan is at 200 dpi you will get large enough sized dots to hold in screen printing. 400 dpi is roughly the same size dot as the 10% dot in 150 line halftone screen and works well for letterpress plates. Diffusion dither can also be called Frequency Modulated screening (FM) where the size of the dot is constant but the frequency varies and the size of the dot is determined by the sample rate of the file. (like 200dpi). The regular halftone dot is Amplitude Modulated (AM) screening, the number of dots per inch is constant but the size (amplitude) is determined by the tone/value of the image.

[whiteyhouston]

set your layer to Dissolve in the layer palette
or use a brush set to Dissolve..

not exactly the same, although I can't quite see what was done in those examples because they are small

similarly you can filters > add noise > gaussian on a layer and then set that to Soft Light, Mult, Screen or Overlay depending on what you need it to do

[whiteyhouston]

Another thing I do is have large scans of halftoned gradients, photocopier noise and photocopied gradient shapes that I use to either brush a texture in or paste into a mask

[ken taylor]

i have always wondered the same thing - thankyou to all above!