Gurus unite! Detailed thresholds?

[maximo]

I don't exactly know what I'm looking for so any help or guidance will be greatly appreciated. I'm looking to take photos of people's faces or cars, or any object really and turn them into something like this: http://www.lolanewyork.com/store/shirts/LEazy-EVneck.jpg (which I was told is the threshold effect.) yet, whenever I do it the image that results is of such terrible quality even after playing with the settings I don't know what to do.

 

[MindBender]

That pretty much looks like the threshold effect to me. One thing you could experiment with is make a duplicate layer, apply threshold... then do something like blurring it and then use blending modes to bring back some of the original so it's not so stark.

To get it on the shirt like that... check out the displace filter.
http://www.thegoldenmean.com/technique/displace1.html

Welcome to PSG.

 

[Gaussian]

whenever I do it the image that results is of such terrible quality even after playing with the settings I don't know what to do.

Can you show us a before/after example? Now it's pretty difficult to make the right suggestions.