outlines & cutouts & stencils

Hi,

I am just trying to find out a best and easiest way to turn photo into a outline and stencil ... for example I have a photo of a person and I want outlines of the person (but not too simplistic but nice bit more detailed) and also for a stencil but same idea considering I need it for people specific features (face and other lines ) need to be recognised by audience ... I use photoshop , freehand, flash ... I tried some tools like trace edge , cuouts etc in photoshop taht sort of work but they don't give clean enough results to grab the outlines and transfer them on to different background ... any ideas ? cheers

Select the layer that the image is on, if it's on a separate layer than the background, and push Command-J (Mac) or Control-J (Windows). Click the Add Mask icon in the layers palette (a rectangle with a circular hole), and select a regular brush, black foreground color, and start painting around your image. When you've masked out everything except your person, completely fill the layer (make sure it's the layer and not the mask... you have to click on the layer's image thumbnail) with black.