Engraved technique
So here at work we produce a keepsake commencement book every year. A few years ago the administration decided to add headshots for all of the major award winners; you know like honorary degrees and the like. Our book is only printed in one PMS color, so color photos were right out. The problem turned out to be the quality of the headshots was very hit or miss. Some were professional studio shots with great lighting and contrast and high resolution while there was always one that would make a drivers license photo look good in comparison.
I ended up solving this problem by using a Photoshop plug-in called India Ink which gives the photos an engraved or half tone look. I was going for engraved to follow along with our very traditionally styled book.
So first we start out with a headshot. I’ll use a good quality one for our example, one of our Project Manager Sarah who doesn’t mind me using her photo. :)
Next I have to selectively lighten and change the contrast of the image to get a good result from the filter. It works best to have a good contrast between the subject and the background, so in this case I need to lighten the background significantly. After using the Quick Selection tool and Select and Mask... we can use Levels to lighten up the background thus:
Now use Levels to lighten up the portrait a bit. I tend to adjust the mid tone input level to about 1.25. Then go to Brightness/Contrast and up the contrast a bit to get some more darkness into back into the shadows. Between 25 and 30 seems to work for me. No you have this:
At this point you need to get your images size and resolution set. I resize the color image so it’s at 100% and 600dpi in InDesign. The resolution of the image has a dramatic effect on how the India Ink filter works. You can vary it wildly by just changing your image resolution.
Once that is set apply the India Ink filter. There are loads of options in the filter so set it whichever you like. A lot of experimentation is inevitable but once you get something you like make sure you set it as a preset in the filter! Here’s what my settings look like:
the moire patterns are a result of the filter sometimes; in this case making this image a low-res jpeg for the blog made it worse. And a detail:
The last step is to make the image grayscale and then change its mode to Bitmap. Set it for 50% Threshold and make it 1200dpi. Save it as a TIFF file. You know have a 1 bit TIFF that can be printed in any single color; in our case a custom blue PMS ink.
Photo by Brandon Vick