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Why Do My Photos Have a Weird Pattern?
by Jess Fraser, staff writer —
C
hances are, you're talking about a moiré (pronounced "more-ray") pattern. Moiré patterns come about when two halftone screen patterns come into conflict — something that you want to avoid.

By the book
A common cause of moirés is by scanning an image that has been previously printed with a halftone screen. A typical example would be a printed photograph in a book or magazine. (You can tell if an image contains a screen by looking very closely with a loop or a magnifying glass.) If a previously screened image is scanned and then printed, there's a good chance a moiré pattern will appear on the image. The original screen in the image conflicts with the screen that the printer is using to render the image and creates a nasty optical pattern.

Work around
You can sometimes get around this issue by blurring an image like this with an image-editing program. Image clarity can be severely sacrificed with this method but it may look better than a moiré pattern. Ideally, you should try to scan the original image, not one from a book.

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