Create Vector Halftone Portraits with Inkscape

[Music] this is nick with logos by nick.com and in this tutorial i'll be demonstrating how you can take an image and use it to trace a vector halftone portrait using inkscape so getting us started here in inkscape the first thing i want to do is just set up the workflow so that we all have a similar setup on our screen i'm going to come up here to where it says view i want to make sure i have custom selected and then i want to zoom i want to go to view zoom and zoom in at one to one okay now what i'm going to do is i'm going to import my example photo so i have over here my other my other monitor i have my example photo i'm going to click and drag that file into inkscape i'm going to leave the defaults as they are and click ok and there we go there is the example photo i will be using for this tutorial this is just a stock photo that i grabbed off the internet i'll have a link in the description of the video if you want to use this image otherwise you can use whatever image you'd like so the first thing we have to do is make this image black and white so i'm going to make sure i have the image selected and i'll come up here to where it says filters and i'll come over to color and i'm looking for grayscale now i'm going to take this menu i'm going to tick the preview box right here just to give us a preview of how this looks uh if you want you can adjust your rgb values up here as well as the as the uh the lightness i like how this looks as it is so i'm just going to leave it as it is and click apply and now that we've done that now that this is applied we can close out of this menu and now i want to open up the layers menu which is located over here or you can just press ctrl shift and l on your keyboard so right this right here layer one this is the layer where the image is located we want to create a new layer to trace our halftone portrait over this image so i'm going to click the plus icon down here and i'm going to add a new layer i'm going to use the layer name i'm just going to leave the default and position we want to make sure we have above current and then go ahead and click add now what i'm going to do is i'm going to create a single circle going over this image right here so let me grab the circles and ellipses tool i'm going to click and drag on the canvas to create a circle i'm going to hold ctrl on the keyboard so it makes a perfectly round circle like that and i'm going to make this black let me grab the select tool and put this towards the top of the uh the top left corner of the image right here and in fact i'm going to scale that down a little more what i want to do is align this in the top left corner here so let's open up the alignment menu which is over here or you could press ctrl shift a and with this circle selected i'm going to hold shift and i'm going to click on the image so we have them both selected and in the align distribute menu i want to make sure i have last selected chosen from this relative drop down and i want to align this to the left edge and then i want to align this to the top edge so that is right there in the top left corner and now we can click off of that to deselect everything so now i'm going to click and drag over the circle so i have just the circle selected and i'm going to go to edit clone create tiled clones and in this menu over here what we're looking for is the trace option now from these settings over here you want to make sure you have traced the drawing under the clone spray items you want to have that selected you want to have color selected you want to leave the defaults as they are over here and then down here we only want presence and size selected we don't want either of these selected and then down here apply the tiled clones to we want to choose width and height and we want to change the width and height to match the width and height of this image so let me click on this image here so i can see the width and height as you can see the width is a thousand pixels wide and then 778 pixels high so i'm going to change this over here let me select the circle again i'm going to change this to pixels and i'm going to change this to the same size that uh the images over here which is 1000 by 778 as you can see i already have it inputted here so once you've done that you can just go ahead and click create and as you can see it's going to create a bunch of copies of that a bunch of copies of that circle and use it to trace over the image here and you can see it a little better if you come over here to the layers menu and turn off the visibility of layer one you can see where it traced that image a little better now let me turn that back on let me come over here let me undo what i just did there by pressing ctrl z let me undo it again ctrl z one more time ctrl z and there we go what i want to do is make this circle a little smaller and see if i can get a better result because i clicked on the wrong thing let me make this a little smaller click on create and as you can see with the smaller circle it added more circles in here there's more circle density so i think that looks a little better if you want let me undo that again if you want you can make this larger and see how that looks this is just a matter of personal preference at this point if you go ahead and click on create you can see how that looks right there i liked how it looked better with the smaller circle so let me undo that one more time and let me just make that a little smaller like that click on create there we go now i'm going to come over here to the layers menu i'm going to turn off the visibility of layer one and if you zoom out you can really see the portrait it almost looks like an actual image but if you zoom in all the way you can see this is indeed a vector tracing there is no quality loss here as you zoom in these are vectors and the cool thing about this is that all of these circles are linked to the original circle so whatever you do to that original circle will be applied to all of the other circles as well let me show you what i mean i'm going to zoom in over here i'm going to take this original circle and move it out of the way let me zoom out to zoom i'm just holding ctrl and rolling up and down the mouse wheel to move the page around just pressing down the mouse wheel and moving the mouse i'm going to take that circle and i'm going to make that blue and as you can see it made all of the other circles blue and this works with any other transformation as well if i make this a little bigger it's going to make all of those circles a little bigger and i think that looks better right there up close it looks like a tracing of a bunch of little circles but if you zoom out you can see it looks more like a photograph so i think that should do it for this tutorial that is how you can very easily go about creating your own halftone portraits using images in inkscape if you have any questions just leave a comment below and as always thanks for watching [Music] [Music]

Channel: Logos By Nick

Views: 25,387

Keywords: inkscape, inkscape tutorial, inkscape halftone, vector halftone, logos by nick, nick saporito

Id: z4fLHKSsCy4

Length: 6min 17sec (377 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 06 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/undrwater]

Fantastic! Hoping this works well for screen printing!

[u/SparklesMcSpeedstar]

Hi, I tried following this tutorial but all I get is an inkscape crash and around forty thousand clones of the circle underneath itself, I don't quite understand what I'm doing incorrectly.