Halftone is a plug-in for PhotoShop™ compatible plug-in hosts. It will work with applications such as Adobe PhotoShop™, JASC Paint Shop Pro™, Corel PhotoPaint™, ULead PhotoImpact™ and MicroGrafx Picture Publisher™ amongst many others.
The Halftone plug-in can apply a customizable halftone dithering pattern to any picture. You've probably seen this effect before when looking at a newspaper where it is used for photographic images and for shading black & white cartoons and graphs. Use the Halftone plug-in to accurately reproduce this effect and have full control over how it is applied.

It is also a popular effect in modern graphics such as a background to logo's or other kinds of dithering effects. Not only does it allow for classic-style dithering but it also includes different shaped dots, such as squares, diamonds and stars, and fine-tuned control, allowing you to do much more.

You can rotate, scale, shift the halftone pattern, change contrast and brightness and even take full control by setting the size range for the dots. Some shapes can even be rotated and configured themselves for maximum control.

You can even apply and mix several different wave patterns patterns to the placement of the dots, allowing for some unique effects. The wave displacements can be radial (circles originating from the center), orthogonal (along the grid lines) and spiral and, as with every of the features, can be fully configured.

Custom shapes can be provided as Windows™ bitmap (.BMP) images of various types and color modes. You can use shapes of any size and may include partially transparent areas. They can be rotated and scaled like the shapes generated by Halftone itself. A wide range of custom shapes is included with Halftone, demonstrating the possibilities. The average intensity of custom shapes is detected and used to scale them to a useful average size on screen.
The Halftone plug-in makes live easy for you by automatically scaling the color range for contrast and allowing both transparent and opaque background colors, fully configurable of course. The size scaling automatically adjust to the size of the image so you can do preliminary tests on smaller-sized images before repeating the process on full-sized images.

RGB, Grayscale and Duotone color modes are supported in both 8-bit and 16-bit color depth, both with and without transparency. Halftone has been tested with image sizes over 10,000 x 10,000 pixels. All calculations in the plug-in are floating-point based, allowing for the perfect anti-aliassing and high precision in the placement of the dots.

Halftone is of the highest quality, ranging from a good-looking yet intuitive interface to the fully anti-aliassed dots or any other shape available. Any configuration made can be saved for later usage by using standard Windows' dialogs. The format of the saved files allows for easy migration to future upgrades of the plug-in.

A demo version is available for download. The demo version will demonstrate every feature in the user interface, including an unchanged preview, but will not render the effect to the source image.