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Halftone Text

Halftone text

I spent some time looking for a way of getting this effect in Photodesk before realising that it's quite easy with Sophie Wilson's ChangeFSI (supplied free with all versions of RISC OS). So until someone produces a halftone plugin for Photodesk...

• First ensure you have both Photodesk and ChangeFSI on your iconbar
• Create your text in Photodesk, in white on a black background. Very bold fonts work best - the above uses Kabled at 64pt and 96pt
• Open ChangeFSI's main menu and go to the Processing dialogue box. Ensure Disable dithering and Smoothing (the default of 4 is OK) are ticked:

  

  ChangeFSI's processing options

• Now go to ChangeFSI's Sprite output dialogue, again on its main menu
• Select Special, and enter "c" in the writeable icon
• Click on the 2 icon in the colours section

  

  ChangeFSI's output options

• Now open the menu over your Photodesk image, click on Photodesk:File>Save as... and select the Sprite format from the pull-down menu.
• Drag and drop the file icon on to the ChangeFSI icon
• You should now be looking at a halftone version of your original. If you're happy, open this image's menu, go to Save image and drag-and-drop the icon back on to Photodesk's icon
• The result will be a 1 bit per pixel monochrome indexed image, so before you do anything further change it to RGB (from the Channels menu)

Notes

• You can get some variations by changing the Smoothing setting in ChangeFSI, or blurring the source in Photodesk first
• Try passing the halftone image through ChangeFSI more than once (drop the save icon back on to ChangeFSI)
• Try other Special parameters: d and t give slightly smaller halftoning dots. See the documentation inside ChangeFSI for explanations of what these actually do.