2 color silhouette advice - Looking at the photoshop wizards

[iasr]

I am working on a new site, and I am attempting to create a hyper-detailed silhouette of an urban skyline:
(base image):


(1st pass result):


I am working on putting in the antannae, with just a few of the birds (don't want to get too hipsterriffic on it)

I am working on smoothing out some of the edges, but I am having trouble finding the architectural shapes when zoomed to 600 or 800% (in the name of accurate anchor pointing).

Has anyone had success in this type of project?

[Hoosier]

your image probably isnt large enough to zoom in very far. lower the opacity of the image so you can barely make out the shapes. you want to be able to see your path. it looks like you've done a great job so far.

for the antennae, i would use a hard-round brush. just use shift or shift+click to make a straight line. no need to pen tool those.

if you want smoother edges, just apply a blur. Gaussian Blur probably being the best

[iasr]

I'll definitely try that.

Something else that occurred to me was to convert to greyscale, max out the contrast, then save as PNG with only 8 colors. Then using the save for web & devices dialogue; remove the sky colors (convert to transparent), save. And use that new shape.

But I'm learning that while sometimes the least amount of effort is the right move, it is rarely the case...

Cheers.