Digital Light & Color

The following workflow examples may not make much sense but they demonstrate complicated relations between transformations and possible problems in their mutual compatibility.

By the way, use ordinary Blur after Halftone as described below does not make sense but use Median Blur does for some special effects.

Example 1

1. open an image
2. run High Contrast
3. run Halftone transformation
4. now if you want to use Blur (Gradient, Sharpen or Color) submenus, you cannot because they are not active
5. use Edit and move Halftone before High contrast
6. Blur Halftone - the submenus mentioned above are now active
7. move High Contrast before Halftone -> Blur thumbnail gets error red
8. double-click the red thumbnail and when the dialog opens, just click OK -> the Blur

step now produces halftoned color image - the High Contrast step is ignored

Example 2
here is shorter way to get the same result:

1. open an image
2. run Halftone transformation
3. Blur it
4. insert Hight Contrast before Halftone -> Blur thumbnail gets error red
5. double-click the red thumbnail and when the dialog opens, just click OK -> the Blur

step now produces halftoned color image - the High Contrast step is ignored


Example 3
now change the order of the steps again:

2. run Blur
3. run High Contrast
4. run Halftone
5. now you cannot run Blur from the menu but you can use Edit or Destination commands and move Blur from the step 2 to under Halftone -> Blur thumbnail gets error red but, this time double-click does not help - the preview gets empty and click on it produces error message Missing input image
6. move Halftone before High Contrast -> Blur thumbnail gets corrected, High Contrast step produces just monochrome image not the high contrast,
7. move High Contrast before Halftone again -> Blur thumbnail gets error red, but this time double-click corrects the Blur thumbnail and produces blurred monochrome image

These issues are all related to the fact that Halftone produces a 1-bit binary image as its output. It looks like I still have some work to do getting all transformations to accept all image types. I fixed the transformation submenu graying, but roughly 100 transformations still need to be rewritten to work correctly with binary input images. Some give an error and some crash. Previously, they were mostly protected from seeing binary images by the menu graying.

In the meantime, converting your halftones to 8-bit black and white should fix all the problems.

Thanks for the tip.
I normally do not have problems with Halftone, at least the way I usually use it in my workflow. I just got an idea what would come out of a halftoned High Contrast image or vice versa.