How to make scanned newspaper effect?

Question

I want to make my good quality photos look like photos scanned from old newspaper. Maybe halftone in high resolution? Or just find an old laser printer and scanner?

Here is few examples what i mean:

Answer 1

I think printing something off and then re-scanning it could work very well, but you may find that even an old laser printer might not give you the halftone that a news paper printer would.

I had an experiment in Photoshop. I used this photo:

1. Image > Mode > Grayscale
2. Put the file in 8-bit mode if it isn't already
3. Image > Mode > Bitmap Here you can experiment to get the halftone you like. How it looks will depend on what resolution you'll end up displaying it at. I left my output dpi at 300 and dropped the frequency, on the next window to 20 for this particular photo. You'll want to make sure the dot style is round for this.
4. Now put the file back into Grayscale/RGB/whatever as when it's in bitmap you can't access many options.
5. You will want to adjust the shading so that black is grey and you might want the whites to look a bit blown out too. Curves works great for this! Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Curves. You can see on my screenshot below how I set up the curves panel for my test.
6. You just need to add a bit of texture now... Some paper texture and some darker black spots where the ink might be thicker. I just used a mixture of Filter > Render > Clouds and Filter > Pixelate > Mezzotint... (coarse dots). And blended these two layers as you'll see below...
7. As scans are never 100% straight, you may also want to rotate the image a fraction too, this will bring in a little moiré pattern though (which could be good but probably bad on screen). You'll probably want to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur... the halftone and the mezzotint layer a small amount after this though to tone it all down a bit.

If you can get a good scan of plain newsprint, that'll help give you some texture too.

You may also want to add a layer to darken the ink in bands too (I've just done this as another quick 10% overlay layer on top, you could definitely make it look even more realistic/rougher than this though):

You'll need to experiment heavily with this to get it exactly how you want but this should help!

Answer 2

Laser printing, manual distressing and scanning would absolutely be an easy straight-forward method.

Barring that, you can (obviously) remove color, then lower contrast and overlay some noise and possibly a texture file to create a distress. I don't know that I would specifically use the Halftone filter, you could. However you may get better results with just noise.

Original

Edited

Closer look

With a halftone filter layer