Hi. This is Marty from Blue Lightning TV.
I'm going to show you an effective way to create smoke.
This is an update of tutorials I've done many years ago on earlier versions of Photoshop.
For your convenience, I provided this image of a candle, so you can follow along.
Its link is in my video's description or project files.
Click the New Layer icon to create a new layer.
Open your Brush Tool.
If your foreground and background colors aren't black and white, press "D" on your keyboard.
We want our foreground color to be white.
If it isn't, press "x" to invert the colors or click this icon.
Open your Brush Picker.
Pick a soft, round brush.
Make its size 300 pixels and its Hardness: 0%.
Its opacity is 100% and make its Flow: 40%.
Brush a curve that ends at the burnt wick.
Go back to the top.
We'll reduce the size of our brush by making sure our Caps Lock key is off
and then pressing the left bracket key on our keyboard 4 times, so its size is 150 pixels.
Brush in another curve that loosely overlaps the first one.
Reduce its size again; this time to 70 pixels.
If you're using CC 2018 or later, you can make your brush strokes much smoother by using
the "Brush Smoothing" feature.
I'll increase the amount to 100%.
I did an in-depth tutorial on this feature, so if you'd like to watch it, I included its link, as well.
We'll convert our brush strokes into a Smart Object, so we can modify it non-destructively.
To do this, click the icon at the upper, right and click "Convert to Smart Object".
Go to Filter, Other and "Maximum".
Basically, the Maximum filter spreads out white areas and chokes in black areas,
while the Minimum filter has the opposite effect of shrinking in the white areas
and spreading out the black areas.
As I mentioned in the video's description, the Roundness preserve was added in Photoshop CC.
Dragging the Radius slider will increase or decrease the effect.
Choose a radius that looks good to you.
We'll convert the smoke into a Smart Object again, so we can modify its shape in its present
form, non-destructively.
Press Ctrl or Cmd + T to open your Transform Tool.
Click the "Warp Transform" icon.
This divides the Transform Tool into multiple, interconnecting segments,
which allows you to drag control points to manipulate the shape of images.
If you don't see it, press Ctrl or Cmd + H.
There are 3 different split lines that we can use to split our warp or you can start with a pre-set grid.
In earlier versions of Photoshop that have Warp Transform, there's only one pre-set grid.
To manipulate the shape, drag the control points, a segment of the bounding box or mesh,
or an area within the mesh.
Click on a grid line to activate control points.
You can drag the grid line in any direction.
By clicking on an anchor point, which is at the intersection of the grid lines, you can
edit the control points surrounding that anchor, by dragging the control points to warp the image.
Make a new layer
and increase your brush size to 300 pixels.
Loosely brush over the other strokes.
Reduce it to 70 pixels and brush loosely again over your other strokes ending at the burnt wick.
Then, convert it into a Smart Object.
Go back to Filter, Other and Maximum.
I'll keep the same Radius amount that my first smoke brush strokes had, however, feel free
to adjust the amount for yours.
Next, we'll taper the smoke near the wick.
Make Layer 1 active and click the Layer mask icon to make a layer mask next to it.
Press "x" to invert your colors, so black is your foreground color.
Brush near the wick to hide the smoke through the Layer Mask creating a tapered shape.
If you want to restore areas of the smoke, press "x" on your keyboard and brush over those areas.
Lastly, we'll add some smoke to the background.
Make the top smoke layer active and make a new layer above it.
Press "x" to make the foreground color white and open your Brush Picker.
Make its size: 1000 pixels and keep its Flow at 40%.
Place your brush approximately here and click once.
Make a new layer and invert your colors again.
Click the foreground color to open the Color Picker.
In the hexadecimal field, type in 24354A, which is the color of the background behind the smoke.
Go to Filter, Render and Clouds.
We only want to see the clouds inside the soft white, circular shape directly below
it in the Layers panel.
To clip it or restrict to that layer, we'll need to make the clouds into a "clipping mask".
To do this press Alt + Ctrl + G on Windows or Option + Cmd + G on a Mac.
You could also go to Layer and "Create Clipping Mask".
If you want to reposition the background smoke, make the soft, white circular shape under
the clouds active and press "v" to open your Move Tool.
Then, just drag it.
Reduce its opacity to 50%.
This is Marty from Blue Lightning TV.
Thanks for watching!