Halftone poster maker: turn a photo into a giant dot poster
Make a wall-sized poster out of big printed dots, ready to print on Letter or A4 paper at home. Black dots or color dots, with cut marks and page labels. Free, and nothing is uploaded.
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Your picture never leaves your device. The pages are made right here in your browser, so nothing is uploaded or stored.
What is a halftone poster?
A halftone picture is made of dots of different sizes: big dots where the picture is dark, small dots where it is light. Up close you see a pattern of circles; step back and your eye blends them into the picture. It is how newspapers printed photos for a hundred years, and it makes striking wall art.
Because the dots are drawn as shapes, a dot poster stays perfectly crisp at any size, even from a small or blurry picture. That makes it the easiest way to print something really big at home.
Choosing the dot spacing
The dot spacing is the distance between the centers of the dots. Smaller spacing shows more detail, larger spacing makes a bolder, more graphic poster.
- 0.2 to 0.35 in (5 to 9 mm): fine detail, good for posters up to about 3 feet wide and faces you want to recognize up close.
- 0.4 to 0.7 in (10 to 18 mm): the classic look for a big wall poster seen from across a room.
- 0.8 in (20 mm) and up: very bold and abstract; the picture appears when you stand far away or squint.
A good rule: the picture should be at least 60 dots wide to be recognizable. The preview updates as you move the slider, so try a few.
Black dots or color dots?
Black dots give the classic newspaper look and work with any picture. They use only black ink, which is cheaper and prints faster. Color dots keep the colors of the picture inside each dot, which looks great with bright, simple pictures like sunsets, pop art and portraits with colored lighting.
Pictures that work best
- Strong contrast: a face lit from one side, a skyline at night, the moon, a silhouette.
- One clear subject: busy pictures with lots of small details turn into noise.
- Crop tight on the subject before you start, so the dots go where it matters.
- Brighten the background if you want fewer dots there; white areas print no dots at all.
It saves a lot of ink
A photo poster covers every inch of paper with ink. A dot poster only prints the dots, and the white paper between them does the rest, so a black-dot poster of a typical photo uses a fraction of the ink. It is a good choice for school projects, party decorations and anything with many pages.
Questions
Is this like the Rasterbator?
It makes the same kind of dotted poster, plus plain photo posters. The difference is that everything happens in your browser: the picture is never uploaded, and you see the result change as you adjust it.
Why are the dots vector shapes?
Each dot is drawn as a perfect circle in the PDF instead of as pixels, so the edges stay sharp however big you print and the file stays small.
Can I print it in color on a black and white printer?
Choose Black dots: the poster uses only black ink. Color dots print in color on a color printer and in shades of gray on a black and white one.
How do I put the pages together?
Trim the right and bottom border of each sheet along the cut marks, lay it over the next sheet so the dots line up, and tape it from the back. The PDF includes an assembly page with the full instructions.
Want a regular photo poster instead?
Use the same tool with the Photo look to print the picture as it is.
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