This little gem of a software fits that bill (somewhat): http://www.lostminds.com/content/vectoraster-main.shtml

Oh yeah, great question, I’ve been wanting to know how to do that for ages but just gave up after extensive googling, perhaps this product is for me. My issue was wanting to make a logo with a gradient indestructible and friendly for large and small applications. Awesome.

The Rasterbator is your friend, not to mention free.

Awesome help. Thanks fellas.

But Rasterbator is for PC only?

Well, yeah, but you can just upload the file and let them process it for you if you only have Macs.

I had no idea rasterbator made vector halftones. Good tip!

Apparently there’s a bit of something you can do to run it on OSX, seems a bit complicated/involved for my non-technical mind and I’ve been a bit busy to try it, but it may help, it’s here and check the thread link down the bottom it seems to resolve a few issues that come up.

Rasterbator can be run off their web site. Just upload an image and they give you a PDF to download.

Hello,

I just tried Rasterbator online ( No Mac :o ) and it did ok.
What i’d like to know is how to get perfect dots in vector format.
I’ve purchased a few halftone dot background clips from iStock, Shutter and Vectorstock.
Seems the ones here: http://vectorstock.com/gallery/1078/
have some clean dots. How was this done?
I’ve tried Illustrator & Photoshop tuts found on the net with semi-acceptable
results but they still looked ’traced’.
Doing these manually is a bit rediculous, I know.

Anyone?

Thanks
Jim

I find this thread looking for vector halftones
for what I’ve seen none of those programs can handle blobs correctly in dark areas.
you see dots in clearer areas and white crosses on darker ones

I attached an image of photoshop halftone (always dots, in white and black)
do you know some way of achieve this in vector?

Creating Halftone Effects from Vectips.

If only there were something in the 2D vector genre that did something like 3D metaballs. It would be relatively simple to space them out on a grid then adjust their sizes to the brightness of a linked image. It is the nature of metaballs to distort their shapes as their surfaces come within proximity of another metaball, which should create the geometric inversion you’re looking for.

There probably is something that does that but I can’t think of it. Best I’ve been able to manage is to generate a super-oversize halftone in Photoshop as dimitre did above and autotrace it.

I too have found that only Photoshop gives convincing results, although I haven’t bothered to autotrace, just saved out the very large image as a bitmap, then scaled down for use.

Probably getting away from the original request, but maybe printing the resulting image on a laser printer and scanning back in, then autotracing, would look even more convincing, giving a bit of dot gain/loss.