Threshold (1-bit)
Every pixel forced to pure black or pure white by a single brightness cutoff. No grays, just a stencil.
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What it is
Threshold picks one brightness cutoff and shoves every pixel to one side of it: above the line goes pure white, below goes pure black. Nothing in between survives, which is why the result reads as a stencil or a spray-paint mask rather than a photo.
It is the house style of punk zines, photocopied flyers, riso masters, and Obey-style street stencils, and it is how you turn a portrait into a logo. Anything that must survive a fax, a laser cut, or a single ink pass ends up here eventually.
Gotcha: the whole image lives or dies on where you put the cutoff, and one global number cannot cope with uneven lighting (bright side blows out, shadow side fills in solid). Fix contrast first, or let the computer choose the number: Otsu's method reads the histogram and picks the single global cutoff that best separates the dark cluster from the light one. When the lighting itself drifts across the frame, no global number can win, and you want an adaptive threshold (adaptive mean or adaptive Gaussian) that recomputes a cutoff per neighborhood. If you still want the feel of tone at 1 bit, you want dithering instead.
Ask AI for it
Apply a hard 1-bit threshold to this image: boost contrast, then map every pixel above roughly 50 percent luminance to pure white and everything below to pure black, with no midtones, no dithering, and no antialiasing on the edges. Aim for a photocopied punk zine stencil: bold connected black shapes, readable silhouette, blown-out highlights.