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Distortionary

Filter 02 · Pattern screens · 0.1 beta

Patterntastic

Halftones in any shape you like.

Redraws the image in tiled shapes: dots, lines, hexagons, stars, hearts, crosshatch and brick. Ink coverage follows the tone whatever the shape, so a star screen reads as cleanly as a dot screen, with crisp or soft edges.

Patterntastic and Retrotastical were one filter, Dithertastical. It is now two: Patterntastic for the shaped screens, Retrotastical for dithering and old displays.

Try it on your photo Buy from $29

For GIMP and Photoshop.

  • GIMP 3
  • Photoshop
  • Desktop app
  • Command line · Enterprise
Two bushbabies peering out of a hole in a wooden post, redrawn as a black-and-white newspaper halftone.
Before After
Bushbabies. The halftone preset: black dots on white at 45°. Photo: Hendrik Prinsloo on Unsplash. 
$ patterntastic bushbabies.png -p halftone

The command that rendered it. Command-line tools come with Enterprise.

Try it live

The real filter, compiled to WebAssembly. Nothing leaves your browser.

Photograph

Photo: Hendrik Prinsloo on Unsplash.

Your image stays on your machine. The filter runs here, in WebAssembly.

Preset
8 px
45°

How it works

6 steps, each doing one thing.

  1. 01

    Input

    The photograph, with an optional vignette toward black or white, placed and shaped by center, window and gamma.

  2. 02

    Tone

    Read from luma, OKLab lightness or one channel, or from red, green and blue separately, each screened at its own angle. Black point, white point and gamma set the range.

  3. 03

    Pattern

    The image is redrawn as a grid of shapes, rotated, stretched, staggered or mirrored. Each shape is balanced so a given tone gets the same amount of ink whether it is drawn in dots, stars or bricks.

  4. 04

    Distort

    Four optional warps bend the pattern: by the image’s own brightness, around a center point (bulge, pinch, swirl), along a wave, or with random plasma. 1

  5. 05

    Ink

    Tone and pattern combine in several ways, from the classic halftone to outlines only. Edges come out clean at any size, or as soft as you like. 2

  6. 06

    Grunge and color

    Optional fray, stains, speckle, scratches and cracks laid over the result, then a color ramp from ink to paper.

Specimens

Every image here is a built-in preset, unchanged.

The bushbabies as fine engraved lines.
Before After
engraving: fine lines that swell in the shadows. Photo: Hendrik Prinsloo on Unsplash.
The bushbabies as soft plum and amber dots.
Before After
soft-poster: plum shadows, amber highlights. Photo: Hendrik Prinsloo on Unsplash.
Red taxis on a Kowloon road marked in Chinese and English, screened in separate red, green and blue dots.
Before After
rgb-screen: each channel on its own angle. Photo: Fre Sonneveld on Unsplash.
A hammerhead shark in dark water, drawn in gold stars on navy.
Before After
stars: gold on midnight, soft-edged. Photo: Jonas Allert on Unsplash.
The bushbabies in navy and cream hexagons.
Before After
honeycomb: hex-packed, navy and cream. Photo: Hendrik Prinsloo on Unsplash.
The Kowloon road and taxis as pink hearts on paper.
Before After
hearts: staggered, pink on paper. Photo: Fre Sonneveld on Unsplash.
A lone tree in a field of wildflowers under a stormy sky, in rippled blue lines.
Before After
waves: thick where the image is dark. Photo: Jerry Kavan on Unsplash.
The bushbabies as blue graph-paper lines.
Before After
grid: lines that thicken into the shadows. Photo: Hendrik Prinsloo on Unsplash.
The Kowloon road and taxis as a black-and-white halftone.
Before After
halftone: road markings hold up in dots. Photo: Fre Sonneveld on Unsplash.
The hammerhead in soft plum and amber dots.
Before After
soft-poster: the shark lit amber, the water plum. Photo: Jonas Allert on Unsplash.

Parameters

Every control, named.

The same names in every host and in the JSON presets. With an Enterprise license, the command-line tool reads those presets and runs them on a thousand files.

Name Range Effect
shape 20 shapes dot, line, hexagon, star, heart, wave, crosshatch, brick-wall …
cellSize pixels Cell width. Line networks want 32 px or more.
angle degrees Pattern rotation, clockwise.
stagger · mirror cells · on/off Brick or hex packing; flip every other shape.
equalize on · off Keep ink coverage true to the tone, whatever the shape.
source luma · lightness · channel · rgb What the screen reads. rgb screens each channel apart.
combine add · multiply · min · max · difference How tone and pattern meet.
threshold midpoint, width, easing Hard or soft cut. Width 0 is a hard edge.
distort luminance · center · sine · plasma Bends the pattern.

Hosts

GIMP 3
A native GIMP 3 plug-in written in C, with the filter linked in statically. GIMP 3.0 or later, Linux and Windows.
Photoshop
A UXP panel running the filter as WebAssembly. Photoshop 2024 (25.0) or later, macOS and Windows.
Desktop app
Distortionary for the desktop: open, adjust with a live preview, export. Linux and Windows; macOS later.
Command line
Enterprise only. The same filter as a command-line tool, for batches, build scripts and render farms. Settings load from JSON presets.

Built on

  • Ottosson (2020)

    OKLab, the perceptual color space the tone and color steps work in.

  • Inigo Quilez

    2D signed distance functions. Most of the tile shapes follow his formulas.

Notes

  1. 1

    Fournier, Fussell and Carpenter (1982). Computer rendering of stochastic models. Communications of the ACM 25(6). The plasma.

  2. 2

    Crow (1977). The aliasing problem in computer-generated shaded images. Communications of the ACM 20(11).

Pricing

Patterntastic alone, or the whole set.

The complete set: the 5 plug-ins' results side by side.

Best value

The complete set

$69 5 plug-ins, $145 separately

Every Distortionary plug-in: Bloomifier, Grungetyper, Patterntastic, Pixeltastic and Retrotastical.

  • Bloomifier, Grungetyper, Patterntastic, Pixeltastic, Retrotastical
  • GIMP: GIMP 3 (Linux, Windows); GIMP 2.10 (Linux, Windows)
  • Photoshop: UXP panel for Photoshop 2024 or later (macOS, Windows); 8bf filter for Photoshop and other 8bf hosts (Windows)
  • A year of updates included: every new version, free, under one license key
For GIMP, $69For Photoshop, $69
A portrait redrawn as a screen of heart-shaped dots.
Before After

Patterntastic

$29

Pattern dithering: tiled shape patterns, tone blending and soft thresholds for screen-print and halftone looks.

  • Patterntastic, Halftone Halftone
  • Patterntastic, Engraving Engraving
  • Patterntastic, RGB screen RGB screen
  • Patterntastic, Honeycomb Honeycomb
For GIMP, $29For Photoshop, $29

Includes a year of free updates

One-time purchase, no subscription, with a year of updates included. Sold through Gumroad. Sample photographs: thank you to Sandro Katalina , Rostyslav Savchyn and Raffaele Parente on Unsplash.

The other filters

Bloom and glare

Bloomifier

Glow that follows the eye, not a blur slider.

Dithering and old screens

Retrotastical

Twenty-five dithers, and the cable and tube they came through.

Distressed type

Grungetyper

Type that wears like the real thing.

Masks

Octodoctor

Masks from gradients and keys, snapped to edges.

Nixie tubes

Nixietyper

Words lit in a row of tubes.