Cut a photograph down to what a carved block can actually print. Relief printing has no gradient: a surface either holds ink or it has been gouged away, so every tone in the source has to resolve to solid ink, bare paper, or a pattern of carved lines.
Relief, not intaglio
The distinction decides how the output looks. In intaglio processes such as engraving and etching, ink sits in lines cut below the surface, so tone is built from dense networks of fine hatching. In relief printing, the artist cuts away everything that should stay white and inks what is left standing. Shapes come first, and any line in the image is a line of removed material.
That is why a linocut reads as bold and graphic where an engraving reads as detailed. It is also why the gouge marks here are pale rather than dark: they are the block showing through, not ink laid down.
Simplify
Blurring before the cut is the step that makes the result look carved rather than thresholded. The radius is a percentage of the shorter image side, so a 4000px photo and its 1200px preview receive the same treatment.
At 0% every strand of hair and every fabric weave survives the threshold and the output turns to speckle. Around 30% to 45% shapes hold together while features stay legible. Above 70% the image collapses to poster-scale silhouettes, which suits a full-frame portrait and destroys a landscape.
Plates
A single plate is one block, one pass, one colour: everything darker than the threshold prints solid. It is the honest version of the technique and the hardest to aim, because a face has to survive on shape alone.
Three and four tones split the range into bands and render the middle ones as parallel lines cut at a fixed diagonal. The duty cycle of those lines carries the tone: a darker band leaves wider standing ink between the gouges. This mirrors what a lino artist does when a second colour is not available.
Edge carve and tool marks
Edge carve wobbles the tone before it is banded, rather than displacing the boundary afterwards. The result follows the shapes instead of running along them, which is closer to how a blade wanders in linoleum. At 0% the boundaries are machine clean, which reads as a digital threshold.
Tool marks remove pale slivers from inside solid ink areas. Real blocks carry them because the artist clears large fields with a wide gouge and the surface is never perfectly flat under the roller. Keep this under 40% unless the intent is a rough, hand-pulled print.
Ink and paper
The defaults are a warm off-black on unbleached stock, which is what most lino prints look like on paper. Pure #000000 on #ffffff reads as a digital threshold rather than a print, so the small offset is deliberate.
Single-colour blocks in red, deep blue, or ochre on cream are common in poster and zine work. A single plate with tool marks at 0% outputs exactly two colours, so the PNG compresses to a fraction of the source and stays sharp when scaled for print.
Limits
The effect works from luminance alone, so two colours of equal brightness land in the same band no matter how different their hues are. A red logo on a green field disappears. Correct that upstream with a channel mixer or a black and white conversion that separates the two, then cut the block.