Krita Tip: screentone

part 1

Hello everyone, I hope today is kind to you.

Today I did the thing whenever I couldn't really whip out a full illustration - exploring the software and tweaking things. This time, I revisit screentone feature in Krita.

The "screentone brush" in Krita was a nice new thing for me, coming from CSP. It makes making screentone instant. But! At the same time, it is also very rigid.

A better method in doing screentones in flexible way (in the intensity) is by using "halftone filter mask" » this is Krita's term. I colour in greyscale, and with the halftone filter mask, it converts my greyscale into dots, with intensity following the strength of the grey that I painted.

One thing that bothers me - which is unfortunately, a big one, is that Krita's halftone does "opacity" instead of "resizing the dots" to represent intensity. I don't know how to put that in words.
This is an old thread that talked about it.

I think, the idea of screentone/ halftone is to only use pure-black colour to print, right? So, smaller dots is the right way, and not opacity.

I called it anti-aliasing - so what I want is for Krita's screentone NOT to have anti-aliasing.

I wonder if that's possible. Should I revive the old forum thread, though? xD I'll think about it...

part 2

Hello everyone! I hope you are doing well! ☆

Today I did more experiments with Krita's screentone. The opacity behaviour still bothered me. I had the feeling that somewhere in the settings there should be a way to convert these non-black pixels to white or transparent.

See, that non-black pixels? Grey-ish, with some opacity.

Lo and behold, there is a way! It is not straightforward, but it is easy enough to do!

Look at the pure black pixels! (exclude the thick lineart). The answer is: Filter Mask (Index Color)!

So I have to apply one more filter mask (on top of Halftone/Screentone filter mask) which is the Index Color filter mask. I set it the way as shown above, and it turned all non-black pixels to white (or anything I would set on that filter mask, actually)!

Awesome! =D

I figured that I could share this on Krita forum since I saw an old thread that talked about it, so I posted this tutorial as a reply there:

Step 1: Paint the value

Step 2: Apply Filter Mask (halftone) on the intended layer

Step 3: Apply Filter Mask (index color) on that same layer

This converts all of the grey/half-transparent pixels into white colour.

We can stop in this step and it already shows the intended result.
But there are some unwanted white specks on the coloured layer, which will be visible if you paint under that layer.

In that case, we can do the cleanup by using the following:

Step 4: Apply Filter Mask (color to alpha) on that same layer too

So now the white specks that used to be grey/half-transparent, is now purely transparent and we can safely colour under it without the unnecessary dirt from the screentone effect leftovers.

I'm excited to discover this workaround, so I think I'll do a comic test page with screentone next! =D

I hope your day is going fine. Good night!