Photo tracing for logo

I've pretty much decided on my brewery name: Penny Creek Brewery. It's based on my street. Our house is on a cul-de-sac and backs up to a green belt, so we have a great view. I took an excellent picture looking out off the back deck of our two Adirondack chairs, table between them, pint glasses on the chairs, cigar and ashtray on a table between them. I'd post the pic, but I'm too much of a newb here. In fact, I think my first post got eaten because I tried to add pics.

Anyway, I've got Paint Shop Pro and just downloaded Inkspace. I want to convert to a more simplified drawing. The label on Fat Tire is a good example. Other acceptable styles would be the Lazy Daze Brewery or Duff Dog Brewery logos in the logo thread.

I've tried several of the tools in Paint Shop, but there seems to be too much variation and shading to get the results I want. Plus, it becomes very difficult to edit portions of the picture like the background. I then tried tracing the whole thing with vectors, but realized quickly that it becomes just about impossible then color the image, at least in Paint Shop Pro.

Anyone have tips for achieving the look I'm going for?

You probably want to mess with limiting the number of colors which is sometimes called posterizing. You can also try making it greyscale and then pushing the contrast through the roof so that you end up with pure black and white. You can take a posterized version and use the live trace feature in illustrator to make vectors that can be painted differently. I don't know if Inkscape has that feature.