Photoshop Halftones

Howard asks,

How can I halftone screen a scanned photo so it is suitable for offset printing?

In the old days, halftones were produced by "sandwiching" a halftone screen with the film before it was exposed. In Photoshop, you add the halftone screen in the Print with Preview dialog box.

Choose File > Print with Preview.
The Print with Preview dialog box appears.
Select the Show More Options option.
Choose Output from the dropdown menu.
Click the Screen button.
The Halftone Screens dialog box appears.
Select the Use Printer's Default Screens option to use the default halftone screen built into the printer.
Deselect Use Printer's Default Screens to choose your own screen settings.

If you're sending the file off to a commercial printer, you can include your custom settings by clicking the Save button and creating a .AHS (Adobe Halftone Screen) file.
When your printer receives the files, their prepress department can easily load your custom settings before they print your job.

Here are Adobe's recomendations for settings:
For a grayscale halftone, enter a screen frequency from 1 to 999.999, and choose a unit of measurement. Enter a screen angle from -180 to +180 degrees.
For a color separation, choose from the following options:
To manually enter the screen frequency and angle, choose a color of the screen for Ink, and enter the frequency and angle; repeat for each color separation.

In either case, it's vitally important to check with your printer for the appropriate settings.

If you happen to know the resolution of the output device and the screen frequency one other option is to select Auto.
The Auto Screens dialog box appears.
By entering these two known values, Photoshop will take care of the rest for you.

Comments

[Howard]

Thanks

[Howard]

Follow up question to Photoshop Halftones. How can I tranfer this scanned photo with all the screen values as a Tiff document to the desktop so that I can place it in a Pagemaker document.