How to create single colour design from image?

Question

I'd like to convert the attached image to a single colour vector to be printed on a clear media at large scale. The blue being black, the white being transparent. I'd like to keep the shading and details as much as possible. Is there an easy way to do this or will I need to create thousands of shapes on top of the black with a white to black gradient simulating transparency (only printing the black).

I tried playing in photoshop to extract the shapes (upping contrast, using colour picker selection, etc.) but couldn't get a detailed enough result.

Any advice would be appreciated before I spend hours going over it.

Mylenium · Answer

Unless you realyl want to ruin your life for the next few weeks re-creating all the subtle gradients this is nothing anyone would print as a vector. I did a simple Image --> Calculations (Red + Green, Add) in PS and a Curves adjustment and got this:

This would be plenty to work with for all sorts of print tasks. I would probably paint out a few of the smaller details so it doesn't look like they are glitches, but otherwise this image can easily be recolored, converted into alls sort of halftone patterns and so on and withz some further processing, an image trace and some manually drawn paths it would probably also work for vinyl cutting to some degree.

Mylenium

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