Halftone Effect Generator
Turn a photo or animated GIF into a halftone dot-screen effect — choose dots, lines or squares, set the screen angle and cell size, and pick your own ink and paper colors. Free and entirely in your browser.
Input
Result
Upload an image or animated GIF and choose a shape, angle, and colors — the preview updates automatically. Everything runs in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
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Guides
Turn a photo or animated GIF into a classic halftone dot-screen effect, entirely in your browser. The preview updates live as you adjust settings — nothing is ever uploaded.
How to use it
- Upload a JPG, PNG, WebP, BMP, or animated GIF.
- Pick a shape — Dots, Lines, or Squares.
- Adjust the cell size, screen angle, and threshold to taste.
- Choose your ink and paper colors, or turn on a transparent background.
- Download the result as a PNG (or GIF, if you uploaded one).
How it works
The image is divided into a grid of cells (rotated by your chosen screen angle). Each cell's average brightness decides how big its dot, line, or square is drawn — darker cells get bigger shapes, lighter cells get smaller ones — the same amplitude-modulated trick offset newspaper and comic-book printing has used for a century.
- Cell size — the spacing between dots. Small values keep more detail; large values give a bolder, more graphic look.
- Screen angle — rotates the grid. 45° is the traditional angle for a single-color halftone; 15°/75° are the angles real 4-color printing staggers between channels to avoid moiré.
- Threshold — shifts which brightness range fills a cell completely vs. leaves it empty, biasing the effect toward more ink or more paper.
- Ink / Paper colors — classic halftone is black ink on white paper, but any two colors work — or turn on Transparent background to get just the dots on their own, ready to layer over something else.
Animated GIFs
Upload an animated GIF and the halftone effect is applied to every frame individually, with the original frame delays and loop setting preserved — the output is a new animated GIF, not a single flattened frame.
Tips
- A smaller cell size on a large image can take a moment longer to render — the preview shows a spinner while it works.
- For a print-ready comic-book look, try Dots at a 45° angle with a mid-range threshold.
- For a retro CRT/scanline look, try Lines at 0°.
Is my image or GIF uploaded anywhere?
No. Reading the pixels, computing the halftone pattern, and re-encoding the result all happen locally in your browser. Nothing is sent to a server.