I've recently been inspired to make a Photoshop screentone tutorial, mainly because I've scoured the internet, and I have yet to find a decent one (and someone named Holly Jolly actually appreciated my last tutorial). If you didn't know, screentones (AKA tonesheets) are sheets of clear plastic with dots on them that manga artists adhere to images to create shading. These things are damn near impossible to find in the States, and cost an arm and a leg. (I've seen up to $6 a sheet!!) Anyway, here are some techniques to make realistic screentones in photoshop that will make your manga look professional in print or on your computer.
Things to keep in mind: Find your DPI (dots per inch). Screentones are basically used for printing, so you'll need to know what dpi you'll be printing in. I'm partial to 300 DPI, because that makes the file not too large, and the pics look great. If you want to put it on the internet, you'll need to realize that the compression of the dots isn't great unless you start out in 72 DPI (screen res) or you don't resample, which leaves you with a pretty large (area) size pic. I'm getting a little ahead of myself, but this will all be described in the tutorial
Step 1. lineart to get your lineart prepared, refer to the first page of my Photoshop tutorial
Step 2. Here I've scanned in some of my lineart and it's ready to go. It has an extra layer to place the tones.
Step 3: Create a new image the exact same size as the one you're working on and leave it blank for now. (A good trick it to do Select>all then Edit>Copy then File>New. This automatically makes the new image the same size as the old one)
Step 4: Now we add some tones. I'll start with the face because um...that's where I always start. First select the area you want to apply tone to with the polygon lasso tool. This part is similar to the Photoshop tutorial.
Step 4: Go back to your blank file and shade it the approximate gray that you want the face to be shaded in.
Step 5: Zoom in to 100% and go to Image>Mode>Bitmap. Then in the Bitmap options screen, set the Output resolution to whatever resolution you are printing at, (I set mine to 300, but most printers won't print above 150) and then, I set the "Use:" to Halftone Screen. Click "OK"
Step 6: and you should get this screen. Set the Angle to 45 and the shape to round. Play around with the frequency a little bit. This is how many dots there are per inch the more there are the smaller the dots because it is trying to keep the overall color as close to the original color as possible. You can mess around with the Shape if you want to, but to just get spherical dots, stick with round.
Step 6: Your blank image should look something like this now. Now hit Select>all and Edit>Copy the entire document.
Step 7: Go back to your artwork image and, making sure you're on the "tone" layer, select Edit>Paste_Into. It should now look something like this:
Step 8:Click on the new masked layer ("Layer 1" in the image above) and Layer>Merge Down it into the tone layer. As you add more tones you might want to keep them seperate on other layers. This is easy. Just click on the tone layer, add a new layer, and merge the newly made mask layer down onto that one instead of the original tone layer, so they stay seperate. You also might want to rename them to be something that describes the area they are shading. ike "face" or "hair"