We went to a Beck concert back in October and it was pretty awesome. One of the things that made it so interesting was the dynamic videos on the giant screens behind Beck and his crew. There was a guy who was bascially a VJ for the displays with some sort of scratch turntable-like hardware that he used to control the images and how they overlapped/changed/merged with each other. One of the effects I liked the most had multiple scales of a halftone pattern that merged together and made some pretty complex designs.

So inspired by that, I decided to play with halftone patterns today in Photoshop.

I started off with a basic halftone filter then duplicated and scaled by half. I played with different offsets between the patterns and several different blending options and opacity. I think there are probably thousands of other patterns that you could come up with but I ended up with about 37 interesting ones in a couple of hours of playing with it. Some of them are just two colors and made with two sizes of halftone (100% and 50%), others are 3 colors or made with 3 sizes (100%, 50% and 25%).

To create your own variations here’s basically what I did:

1. Open a new image in Photoshop with square dimensions (I used 500 x 500 at 72 dpi)
2. Choose Black for your foreground color
3. Apply Filter->Sketch->Halftone Pattern with the following settings:
   • Size: 12
   • Contrast: 23
   • Pattern Type: Dot
4. Apply Levels with the following settings:
   
5. Smooth the dot edges by applying Filter->Blur->Gaussian Blur with a Radius of 1.0
6. Apply Levels again with the following settings:
   
   Your image should look similar to this at this point:
   
7. Duplicate your layer
8. Apply Edit->Transform->Scale and set Width and Height to 50%
   You should see something like this:
   
9. Now play with the blending modes and opacity of that smaller layer. You can change the opacity to 50% to get a 3 color pattern. Don’t be afraid to move the top layer up and over several pixels to get different effects.
   For instance here’s an example of what it looks like with the top layer in the Difference blending mode:
   
10. When you’ve had some fun with that, duplicate the top layer and reduce it by half again and start over the experimentation with opacity and blending modes for the top two layers.

To create your tile for the repeating pattern:

1. Choose Select->All
2. Choose Select->Transform Selection
3. Click the lock between Width and Height on the toolbar so that you will be scaling only as a square:
   
4. If you created your image at 500×500 pixels like I suggested, enter 100px or 50px into Width (Height will adjust automatically) and you will see your selection shrink and be perfectly centered. If you started out with different dimensions you will have to play with the size to figure out what gets the whole pattern.
5. Exit the transformation stage by pressing ENTER.
6. At this point you can copy and paste your selection into a new image and save it to use as a background (as on a web page) or you can create a Photoshop fill pattern to use for any projects later. To create the fill pattern, choose Edit->Define Pattern… and give your creation a name.

Voila!!

Since these are all grayscale there are a lot of possibilites for changing color schemes and they could be interesting backgrounds for some projects. You can download the Photoshop pattern file that I made with all the patterns above and use them for whatever you’d like! If you use them for anything interesting, please let me know. I’d love to see what you do with them!