Photo to dots composition - halftone efect but with separate circles

@defaultvzcl5dtuczux : basically, place your picture in the back, then draw one circle up in the top left corner (doesn't matter what colour: I used pink so it was easy to see against the b&w photo. You can change this later)

You might want to do some planning as to what size circle to draw: In my case I planned on 40 circles of 15pt diameter across a 600pt document, and 50 down.

Select the circle and Edit > Clone > Create Clone Tiles.

In that dialog, you have a bunch of options as to spacing etc, but the main one is the Trace tab;

In there select "Trace the drawing under...."

Next: pick what to sample. In my case, the luminance of the photo as it's grayscale, so "L"

Under apply the value, pick Size, so each circle will resize proportionally to the grey value below it.

Set your columns and rows numbers.

Create!

Export as PDF and open in Illustrator. You can delete the photo, of course.

Also, you will have a duplicate circle at top left (the original). you can delete that too.

As far as making sure the circles don't touch, i would manipulate your picture in PS to make sure your darkest grey is not 100% Black; maybe go 90% and see what happens.

You can also adjust Gamma in the above Clone dialog.