Halftone
A photo rebuilt from dots that grow and shrink with brightness, the way newspapers and comic books print gray.
See it
What it is
Halftone rebuilds a continuous-tone photo out of a regular grid of dots whose size tracks brightness: big fat dots in the shadows, tiny specks in the highlights. It exists because a printing press can only put ink down or not, so tone had to be faked at a scale your eye blends back together.
Reach for it when you want print DNA on screen: comic panels, newsprint, risograph and screen-print posters. Worth keeping straight, since everyone mixes them up: Ben-Day dots are not photographic halftoning. That process used pre-made sheets of dots and lines at fixed sizes, laid down and overlapped to build color and shading, which is why the dots in Lichtenstein's paintings march along at one uniform size instead of swelling and shrinking with tone. Real CMYK printing rotates each ink's dot grid to a different angle (roughly 15, 45, 75, 0 degrees) so the dots form a rosette instead of stacking up.
Gotcha: dot size is absolute, not relative. A halftone tuned at 1x turns into mush at 2x or fights the display's pixel grid and throws off a moire shimmer. Pick a dot pitch in device pixels, keep it above about 4px, and regenerate rather than scale.
Ask AI for it
Apply a halftone screen to this image: sample it on a regular grid rotated 45 degrees and replace each cell with a filled circle whose radius scales with that cell's darkness, so shadows read as fat overlapping dots and highlights nearly disappear. Dot pitch around 6px, hard-edged circles with no antialiasing softness, single ink color on a paper-white background, old comic-book print feel.