Another program I am able to use and develop work with in CAD is Illustrator. This program is designed specifically for creating graphics. The program has an element called Image trace which effectively takes out all colour and turns the image solidly black and white.
With this image trace applied the threshold can be manipulated to increase or decrease the areas covered by black or white picking up more shadow or light.
These two images (above higher threshold and below lower threshold) demonstrate the image trace feature on my photograph.
With these image traces I could then manipulate and enhance the image in Illustrator or Photoshop. illustrator is a program specifically developed for graphic design and incorporates more features than Photoshop to create graphics. Patterns and manipulation of images are available as well as effective distortion applied to create strong imagery. There are certain brushes and tools available such as ink blot that I used on my image trace. Other elements such as adding frames to an image are already set up in illustrator and filling areas with patterns designed by yourself are much easier.
Using Image trace in Illustrator, the image created can also be edited in Photoshop. This is the method I used to create several images filling the traced areas with colours and other photographs as textures. I found this method of using image trace and then editing the traced image in Photoshop to be the easiest method in creating pieces of work. Although specifically designed for this work I was not as skilled in illustrator techniques and found it much easier to bring the image back into the program I already knew.