halftone-dots

Front page, screamed in 72-point. The photo someone clipped out of a 1975 paper. Pop-art that knows it’s ink on cheap stock.

Open the editor Download .cinerune project

halftone-dots sample frame rendered from the bundled demo project — A real frame exported from the bundled `demo.cinerune` project.

What it’s for

Before screens, this is how a photograph survived a printing press: tone broken into dots, big in the shadows, small in the light, the eye doing the blending. halftone-dots rebuilds that out of the char ramp — each cell’s luminance picks a dot size, the darkest cells cut clean to black, and the whole field can shimmer as the dot sizes pulse, like newsprint caught mid-press or a Lichtenstein panel that won’t hold still.

The cut-to-black threshold is the trick that makes it read as print rather than as a filter — real halftone has hard paper-white and hard ink, not a soft grey wash. Quantise the tone into a few hard steps and it’s a wanted poster; leave it continuous and it’s a glossy magazine spread. The shimmer takes it from a still clipping to something alive and slightly editorial.

Reach for this when: a frame should feel printed — mass-produced, urgent, ironic — turn levels down to two or three for a stark protest-poster cut, or leave it at zero for a smooth photo-repro look with just the shimmer breathing.

Where it lives in the app

Effect group Char remap & print in the effects tray. It is a per-cell remap pass and can be gated by a mask layer, so you can drop a halftone treatment onto one subject while the rest of the frame keeps its native ramp.

Parameters

Key	Range	Default	Effect
`rampStyle`	Dots / Blocks / Blocks + dots / Project ramp	Dots	Which glyph set sizes the dots
`threshold`	0–1	0.08	Luminance below which a cell goes black
`gamma`	0.3–3	1.6	Tone curve of dot growth
`levels`	0–16	0	Quantise tone into N steps (0 = continuous)
`speed`	0–4	0.6	Shimmer animation rate
`shimmer`	0–0.4	0.12	Amount the dot sizes pulse

Pairs well with

palette quantize (two-tone) — ink and paper, nothing between. The frame becomes a risograph pull, cheap and loud and intentional.
text-glitch — a halftone photo with the caption tearing apart reads like a front page someone’s trying to censor in real time.
paper grain — fibres and tooth under the dots and it stops being a screen and becomes stock you could fold. The single most convincing add.
slow push-in — drift in on a halftone face and the dots resolve as you approach, exactly the Blow-Up enlargement beat.

Demo project

The downloadable demo.cinerune is this single effect applied to Cinerune’s bundled code-assembly plate — an amber procedural portrait — with halftone-dots over it. Drop it into the editor (File → Open from disk…) to tweak parameters live. The frame shown above is exported from the same project.