Newsprint: a halftone screen in charcoal on yellowed paper
Newsprint swaps error diffusion for the Halftone screen algorithm, which rebuilds the picture from a regular grid of dots that swell in the shadows and shrink in the highlights, the way newspaper photos are printed. The ink is a soft charcoal instead of pure black and the paper is a yellowed beige, with Contrast eased to 10 and Grain at 25 to mimic cheap, absorbent stock.
Make it yours
Coarsen the dot screen
For fat tabloid dots, move Pixel size from 2 to 4 or 6. The coarser screen survives being scaled down in a blog header or a social card, where the fine magazine-grade dots of the preset would blur into flat grey.
Age the paper further
Shift Light color from its pale beige toward a warmer tan and raise Grain from 25 to 45 for a clipping that looks decades old, or set Vignette to around 30 to darken the corners like a sun-faded page.
FAQ
How is a halftone screen different from dithering?
Both fake grey tones with only two colors. Error-diffusion dithers such as Atkinson or Floyd-Steinberg scatter single pixels in an irregular texture, while a halftone screen keeps dots on a fixed grid and varies their size. Halftone reads as print, diffusion reads as early computer graphics. Here halftone is one of the 14 entries in the Algorithm list, so you can flip between the two on the same image.
How it works
Upload an image
Add a PNG, JPG or WebP up to 20 MB and keep the original ratio or crop to 1:1, 4:5, 3:2, 16:9 or 9:16.
Choose a mode
ASCII with 8 character sets including Braille, Blocks, Binary, Matrix and your own characters; Dither with 14 algorithms; or Shapes with pixels, dots, lines and diamonds.
Style and use it
Set a palette such as 1-bit, Game Boy, Terminal or CGA, add scanlines, bloom or grain, then sign in with a free UX Pilot account to use it on the canvas or export it.