I'm relatively new to the idea of using digital screentones, and have come to an annoying bump. I have three pages that I thought were complete, but when I went to resize them, the toning unfortunately went into some nasty patterns - I believe they're called noire patterns?

Anyway, what's the best way to avoid this? Should I complete all the resizing first before I tone?
Or would it be enough to zoom to the exact size I want to post online and make sure the tones don't leave a pattern at that level?
I'd really appreciate any suggestions or insights. I'd be happy to clip some samples out if anyone needs to see anything. (otherwise you'll have to wait till they're posted :P)

You could probably get around that problem by putting it into Illustrator as a symbol or grouped object and resizing it as a vector.

I don't mess around with tones much so I'm not an expert, but my experience so far is that Adobe Illustrator can solve almost any resizing problem.

Hi Sajomir

I've only ever tried this with Gimp; I think it was the 'newsprint' filter, which I used to make a Benday dot effect from flat colours. You'll always get those patterns if the dots get too small. What I found most useful was, rather than shrinking the artwork then applying the tones, do two or three tests to work out how big you need to make the dots so that, when you finally do resize, the screentones will be at the optimum resolution.

It's just a matter of trial and error, which is fun fun fun.

Ah, so you mean deliberately making the dots bigger that they won't pattern, and that they'll still look natural after all resizing - in short, make it look good as a final piece rather than look good within the program :P

It's so brilliantly simple! XD
Pity it takes so much longer, though. The catch is, the program I use (Manga Studio 3.0 Debut) doesn't handle resizing or exporting finished images very well on its own. I always have to export as a .psd, open that in my old Paint Shop Pro 8, and resize/export the final image from there.

I'd love to play with Illustrator, but I don't own it, can't afford it at the moment, and won't pirate it. Getting hooked on a free trial ain't what I need, either, or I'll be screwed a month down the line, eh? :P

Thanks for the help, guys!