How to make a risograph effect
What makes a risograph print look the way it does, the five moves that fake it in any layered editor (limited inks, halftone, translucent overprint, misregistration, grain), the classic ink pairs, and the route in Voidcanvas with a live duotone to start from.
Intermediate5 min readUpdated 27 September 2026Effects · Halftone, Duotone, Film Grain
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What makes a riso look like a riso
A risograph is a stencil duplicator: one drum per ink, one pass per colour, soy-based ink pushed through a master onto uncoated paper. Every quirk of the look comes from that mechanism, which is why filters that add "riso texture" to a full-colour photo never convince.
| Quality | Where it comes from | How to fake it |
|---|---|---|
| Few, flat colours | One drum per ink; most prints are one to three colours | Duotone (one ink plus paper), then a second ink for type and shapes |
| Visible dots in the photo | The master screens the image into dots | Halftone before the duotone, coarse enough to see |
| Darker colour where inks cross | Inks are translucent, so overprints mix | Multiply blend mode on every ink layer |
| Slight misalignment | Each pass is fed separately; registration drifts | Duplicate a layer in the other ink and nudge it 3 to 6 px |
| Grain and speckle | Ink on uncoated paper, uneven coverage | Film grain at low opacity over the whole design |
| Warm, not white | Paper stock is usually cream or coloured | Set the duotone highlight to an off-white or the paper colour |
Pick the inks
Real riso inks are a fixed set, and the recognisable pairs are recognisable because they are those inks. Working from the classics keeps the result honest.
| Pair | Ink 1 | Ink 2 | Paper | Feels |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The classic | Fluorescent pink #FF48B0 | Blue #0078BF | Warm white #F4EFE6 | Zines, gig posters. Overprint goes purple. |
| Warm | Red #FF665E | Teal #00838A | Cream #F6F0DC | Food, summer, markets. Overprint goes dark brown. |
| Cool | Federal blue #3D5588 | Yellow #FFE800 | White #F7F7F2 | Editorial, posters. Overprint goes green. |
| Quiet | Black #000000 | Orange #FF6C2F | Kraft #D9C4A3 | One ink plus a spot colour on brown paper. |
One ink carries the photo; the other carries type and shapes. The paper colour is the lightest thing on the page, so nothing should be pure white.
The five moves, in any layered editor
- Prepare the photo. Crop tight, convert to black and white, and push the contrast so the highlights go nearly white and the shadows nearly black. Flat photos make grey, muddy dots.
- Halftone it. Turn the tone into dots at the size you will see it: fine for a screen, coarser for a poster (0.5 to 1 mm dots on paper). How to make a halftone portrait has the sizes.
- Ink it. Map the halftone to one ink on the paper colour with a duotone: shadows to the ink, highlights to the paper. This is the layer the whole design sits on.
- Overprint the second ink. Set the headline, shapes or a second image in the other ink and set that layer to Multiply. Where it crosses the first ink, the two darken into a third colour, exactly as translucent inks do.
- Knock it out of register, then add grain. Duplicate a type or shape layer, recolour the copy in the first ink, keep it on Multiply and nudge it 3 to 6 px. Finish with a light film grain over the whole stack so the photo, the ink and the type share one texture.
How to do it in Voidcanvas
Quick: one image, no type
- Open Effects and drop in the photo. In the Effects panel choose Artistic, then Halftone, and set Dot Size and Contrast under Parameters.
- Press Open in Editor. The photo arrives with the halftone as a live filter layer.
- Choose Filter, Colour, Duotone, above the Halftone layer, and set Shadow Color to your ink and Highlight Color to your paper colour.
- Choose Filter, Enhance, Film Grain, keep Amount low, and lower the layer's Opacity if it is too strong. Export as PNG.
Full: a poster with type in two inks
The complete recipe at print size, with the second ink on Multiply, the duplicate nudged out of register, the grain over everything and a PDF at the end, is the workflow Make a risograph or screen-print look with Effects and the Editor. It uses the same five moves with every menu named.
Common mistakes
- Full-colour photo with grain on top. That is a filter, not a riso. Reduce to one ink first.
- Pure white paper. Set the duotone highlight to cream or off-white; white kills the print feel.
- Inks on Normal. Without Multiply the overlap does not darken and the second ink looks pasted on.
- Everything misregistered. One or two elements, a few pixels. More reads as an error.
- Halftone too fine for print. Dots that vanish on screen also vanish on paper, and the image goes solid.
Does this make files for a real risograph printer?
No. A riso printer needs one greyscale file per ink (the separations). This recipe makes the look in one flat file for screens or ordinary printing. To print on a real riso, ask the print shop how they want the separations and build each ink as its own black-and-white layer.
What colours are risograph inks?
A fixed set from the manufacturer, of which the best known are fluorescent pink, blue, red, teal, green, yellow, federal blue, orange and black. The pairs in the table above use their approximate hex values.
Risograph or screen print: is the effect different?
They share dots, flat inks, overprint and misregistration. Screen prints tend to have cleaner, more solid ink and coarser dots; riso has more speckle, more paper showing through and a softer edge. Raise the grain and lower the ink opacity slightly for riso; lower the grain and use a coarser halftone for screen print.