Before and After

So I got a few questions about the silhouettes so I thought I'd show the before and afters.  I just figured this out by playing around so there may be a better way out there, but this works for me.

Not sure how well you can see the settings in these screen captures but I'll write out the important bits.

For Coulee below, I had my camera at ISO 100, F/2.8 and 1/8000 shutter speed.  I wanted to under expose her and the ground.  As the day was overcast and not super bright, I also ended up under exposing the sky.  So in editing, I cranked up the brightness and the blacks.  I also reduced the saturation just to get rid of the little bit of colour that was left.  And that was it for this one.

I went out today with Constance and Paisley. The ground was lighter due to a light snowfall and the sky was darker due to thicker cloud cover so we didn't have much contract at all.  For this one the camera settings were - ISO 200, f/3.2 and 1/3200 shutter.  I'm not sure if this is what they should have been at or not...  I had to crank the exposure, the fill light, the brightness, the contrast and the blacks.  I again decreased the saturation.

I also had to go in a use the paint brush tool to get rid of some black dots in the background.  I just set the brush to the max exposure so it would turn everything it touched white. (The picture below is before I used the brush tool.  See how grey the edge of the photo looks?  I'm not sure if you'll be able to click it big enough, but that is just a whole lot of dots) I also took the exposure brush at the lowest exposure setting and filled in a few light spots on Paisley. Some of her white spots stayed white and needed darkening.

The more severe editing gave the outline a much harder edge but I really like them as well.  The finished images are below.

We didn't think it was working so we didn't play around for very long.  It was also very cold and Paisley's newly groomed feet were not happy with the cold and sharp grasses.  We'll just have to do it again one day soon.