Photoshop Tutorials

Tutorial Details

Difficulty : Easy

In this second digital painting tutorial i will teach you how to create a fire effect that I stumbled across whilst making an image. Its fairly simple and requires only basic knowledge of blending modes.

This will work on any version of photoshop from 6 up. Obviously CS4 is recommended and if you haven’t tried it out you should!

Step 1

First of all ensure your back ground is set to black, it is important as the end result does vary quite considerably depending on the choice of color used. You will need to brush out a fiery shape with a white brush set to 100% opacity and 100% thickness. Having some debris flying around randomly does help add to the effect as sparks.

Try different brush setting to get interesting effects. Also having some premade brushes will help you. Search deviant art or the freebie page on simplypsd.com. But to give you a rough example, check the image below.

Step 2

The next step is still simple, duplicate you initial brushed fire shape layer, and set a new layer to overlay. Then hit Ctrl+U and check colorize using the following settings:

• Hue = 35
• Saturation = 25 (default)
• Lightness = -50

This should give you a similar effect to the image below.

Step 3

Another simple step is to just duplicate your overlay layer and set it to color burn as you can see in the image below.

Step 4

In this step we will be going over what weve done before. So follow steps 2 and steps 3 through one more time, duplicating your layer, overlay, hue, duplicate, burn, new group, merge down etc. Just follow 2 and 3 again with this new layer and all is well. Hopefully you should achieve this messy object, which is all you want really as seen in the image below. The following step will show you the finished product!

Now you could leave it there, if you want to ( merge all layers, except black layer, and set to hard light), however I continued. Since the effect can be enhanced.

Create a layer set ( group ) using the folder icon at the bottom of the layers box. In the correct order, put the three layers you have into the set. Select the set, and hit ctrl+e thus making one new layer.

Step 5

Set your final layer to hardlight and thats pretty much it, the mess vanishes, and you have yourself a nifty explosion. It works well for space effects, impact scenes etc (image below).

To give an example of how you may use it, check the image below.

The Final ImageClick To Enlarge