How to create this effect from a photo?

[Living Shred]

Well first off, hello to everyone, this is my first post here. I have been using Photoshop for quite some time now, but I don't do too much with it...usually use it to do minor tweaks and sometimes touch up photos for family members, so my knowledge of advanced things is virtually nonexistent.

My questions is how to recreate the effect in the picture below. I found this picture while browsing Metallica (my favorite!) images on Google, and this picture really stood out. I really like the cartoonish, comic-book type effect, and was wondering if anyone could link me a tutorial on how to do it, or tell me how. I would search, but I'm not sure what the effect is even called or where to start. Anyway, any help with this is appreciated!

 

[mozartdminor]

I'm pretty sure that picture is a vector drawing with some extra touch-ups/effects added on. If you want to copy it exactly, look into vectors, vector drawings and become really good friends with your pen tool.

You can kind of (not really) imitate that effect using posterize, try something like this:

Image->adjustments->desaturate
then
image->adjustments->posterize
drag the bar down to somewhere between 16 and 4 (just a guess, it'll depend on the picture)

at this point you should just have large areas of grays and blacks left, but the edges will be messy you can either apply a soft Gaussian blur to the whole image (Filter->blur->gaussian blur, set to somewhere between .5-1.0), or use your blur tool to soften up the edges.

This is not an exact duplicate of the effect, and will look less clean/professional, but it's the closest I can get you without getting too advanced, or teaching you how to vector.