Silhouette Photography - Quick Editing Tip

Here's a quick tip for editing gorgeous silhouettes. I love actions and use them often - my favorites being a mix of Totally Rad Actions and Kubota Actions. Just FYI it's super easy to get caught up in action fever and end up with photos that look too over processed. The trick is to make subtle adjustments to enhance an image - unless you want the picture to have that super saturated / comic effect. And if that's what you're going for, totally cool.

Here's the before picture, straight out of camera, without editing. As you can see this is not exactly a silhouette even though that was my intention with this shot. Yes, I try to get things right in camera as much as possible but sometimes it just happens - no big deal. The exposure is fairly close to what I want and that's an easy fix.

camera: 5D Mark II
lens: 24-70 2.8 L
settings: f/7.1, 1/200, 24mm, 800 iso

And here is the edited silhouette!!

actions used -
Totally Rad Actions (from Daily Grind set)  - "lights out"  used twice
Kubota Artistic Actions (Vol. 2 set)  - "Hawaiian punch"  used once
+ actions adjusted to taste using layer masks