How to Quickly Make a Blurred Halftone Effect in Photoshop

Halftone is a printing technique that mimics continuous-tone visuals by employing dots that change either in dimension or spacing, producing a gradient-like impression. It has been used in design and illustration for decades, frequently featured in various design pieces to create captivating backgrounds and eye-catching titles. In this tutorial, I will show you how easily you can create a halftone effect with a unique twist—by adding a blur effect to your text and leveraging the manipulation of halftone dot spacing and size to achieve a visually appealing text effect.

Step 1

Open Photoshop and make a new file at any size you want. In this case, I will make mine at 1800 x 1200 px using Black as background color.

Step 2

Select the Horizontal Type Tool (T) and type your text using any font you want. Here I will be using Abril Fatface at 340 pt.

Step 3

In the Layers Panel, select both the Background and the Text Layer.

Step 4

With both layers selected go to Layer > Smart Objects > Convert to Smart Object.

Step 5

Go to Filter > Blur Gallery > Tilt Shift.

Step 6

In the Tilt Shift window, click and drag any of the 2 dots to rotate a bit the effect (about 5% should be fine).

Step 7

Set any Blur amount you want (I will set mine to 20 px) and click OK in the Top Toolbar.

Step 8

Go to Filter > Pixelate > Color Halftone.

Step 9

Lastly, set the "Max. Radius" to 6 pixels, all the Channels to 45º and click OK.

Some Final Tips:

Now that you know how easy is to make a Blurred Halftone Effect in Photoshop, you can play with different blur setups, various combinations of halftone sizes and angles to achieve an unlimited number of effects like in the following examples.