A coarse halftone screen at a 45 degree angle, crushed midtones and paper grit. The look of a photo that came off a web press.
Open the editor with this effect
A newspaper photo is a compromise between a fast press, cheap absorbent paper and a deadline. The image is broken into dots on an angled grid, the ink spreads a little as it soaks in, and most of the gentle midtones disappear. Getting the look right means copying those compromises, not just laying dots over a photo.
Newsprint is coarse, so papers used low screen rulings, often somewhere around 65 to 85 lines per inch. That is much coarser than a magazine, and it is the main reason newspaper dots are visible to the naked eye.
The screen sits at 45 degrees. A diagonal grid is less noticeable to the eye than a horizontal one, so black ink has run at that angle for over a century. When the angle is wrong the image looks like a digital filter straight away.
Ink spreads into the fibres of the paper, which printers call dot gain. Dark areas fill in, shadows lose detail and the whole image gets heavier than the original photograph.
Cheap paper is also off white and slightly rough, which adds a faint unevenness to every flat area.
Keep it in mono. Most newspaper photography was black ink only, and a colour halftone pushes it towards comic books instead.
Use a low dot count. In Bitgrain that means a bigger dot size, so the screen is clearly visible when the image is shown at full width.
Push the contrast. Crushing the midtones imitates the way a press loses the subtle greys, and it helps the subject read from a distance.
Add grit. The grit control roughens the dot edges the way ink bleeds on porous paper. A small amount is enough, too much starts to look like damage rather than printing.
Strong silhouettes and clear lighting survive the screen best. A portrait lit from one side, a crowd against the sky or a building in hard sun all hold up well.
Low contrast photos with lots of soft detail, like foggy landscapes, tend to turn into an even grey field of dots. Raise contrast first or pick a different shot.
Faces need care. Very coarse screens can turn eyes into single dots, so check the result at the size you plan to show it before you commit.
Open the editor from this page and a mono halftone with newsprint contrast is already set. Drop in your photo.
In the halftone panel, set the dot size until the screen is visible, keep the angle at 45 degrees, and add grit for ink spread.
If you want an aged clipping, stack a little grain on top so the flat areas pick up some tooth.
Export as PNG for screens, or SVG if you want every dot as a vector shape for a printer, a riso or a laser cutter.
Use a coarse mono halftone at 45 degrees, push the contrast so the midtones crush, and add a little grit so the dot edges look like ink on rough paper.
It uses the same halftone engine, set up the way a newspaper press works: one ink, a coarse screen and heavy contrast. The halftone page covers colour and CMYK screens too.
Yes. SVG export keeps every dot as a vector, so a print shop can scale it without blur. Full resolution PNG is available on Pro.
No. Everything runs in your browser and nothing is uploaded. The effect is a classic image processing algorithm, not an AI filter.