Digital Schafline

[Richard Harrington]

Umm…

what’s schafline mean?

Richard M. Harrington, PMP

Author: Photoshop for Video, Understanding Adobe Photoshop, and ATS:iWork

[Dan O’gara]

Sorry I didn’t explain very well! Back in the (pre digital) day, we used a process called Schafline to convert mainly mono images into dot format which could be treated as a line drawing whithin a limited range of increasing or decreasing size for better visuals in a newspaper, see link for an example (scroll down to near bottom of web page).
https://www.graphics.com/modules.php?name=Sections&op=viewarticle&artid=496

I can adjust an image in photoshop to reproduce well in a newspaper, but I wondered if I could reproduce the schafline effect with a filter or something.
I guess that I’ll have a play around in PS and see if I can set up an action that can imitate roughly what I want to acheive.

Cheers

Dan

[Mike Gondek]

Andromeda has a product and it looks like they recently from screns and is now called artistic screening tools (they added cutline and etchtone).

https://andromeda.com/main/screens.php

Velociraptor is another good one to buy incase your shopping.

The wall street journal is the only publication I can think of that still uses Schafline (really nice), but they have some really weird specs when I submitted art to them. (40% max dot they asked forI was concerned about the huge loss in tonal range). But my 12 page spread worked and printed nice.

Another method for doing this is to take a grayscale image and use image >> mode >> bitmap. You can actually choose custom pattern to make an image using your logo or etc as a halftone pattern.

Let me know if you get the new Artistic Screening Tools and if you like it. Good to see someone on the forums who remembers the good old days.

[Dan O’gara]

Cheers Mike,

I downloaded the demos of the Artistic Screening Tools and I love the Etchtone effect!

Thanks for pointing me in the direction of making up my own bitmap patterns, I’m going to experiment with different line thicknesses and see what happens.

Dan