Add Smoke To Photo Photoshop

[Martta]

Youcan get rid of most of it in Lightroom/Camera Raw. Move the blacks/shadows sliders to the left. The fireworks are so bright they'll be at the other end of the histogram and largely unaffected. You could do this with levels or curves.

You may still wish to increase overall contrast slightly using the black and white sliders in Lighteoom4. I would use these sparingly as a little goes a long way depending on the effect you are after.

In Photoshop you could also add a layer behind, either of a gradient, from a sample section of the sky, from another photo, or by blurring the main picture, and then manually mask (not sure if that's the right term) away the smoke.

Q: I love how you give every image a name reflecting your personal interpretations and then let the viewers discover for themselves. Can you share some of your favorite or most popular images and their names?

For those interested, I do sell prints of my work, usually printed on metallic paper, which seems to give the smoke added dimension. As I try to print from an online printing house in the country of the buyer to reduce shipping cost, other paper may be used, and different options are available.

A: The best advice I can give is control your light. Lighting is essential in photography in general, and is pivotal with smoke photography. Think about two aspects of the light, its direction and its strength.

Light strength: As we typically want to create sharp detailed smoke trails, we need to shoot with a high shutter speed (to freeze the smoke with out any motion blur), small aperture (to increase sharpness and DoF) and low ISO (to limit any noise and loss of detail). All of these settings essentially reduce the light that is captured by the sensor, and for this reason you will need a strong and powerful light source to compensate.

Which lens you use, and how far you place it from the smoke is up to you. I would suggest you use the sharpest and highest quality lens you have. Mine happens to be a zoom, which can be handy to rapidly change the composition during the shot. While you could try to set your focus while snapping off the first few shots, I usually focus even before lighting the stick with the lights still on. I hold something where the smoke will likely be, focus on it, and then make sure that the lens is set to manual focus for the rest of the shoot.

Q: Ok, so we have some decent shots, now on to post production work. Is this where you spend most of your time? How long does it take to colorize a single image? Do we have to be an expert in Photoshop?

Next up is the crop tool. You may want to focus in on a particular area of the smoke to get the composition you want. You can also increase your canvas size with a black background and then crop to your original pixel values if you want to change the composition without losing the picture size or ratio.

Once you've settled on a photo of your own or downloaded the above photo, we're going to edit it using Photoshop. For this article, I'll be using CS5. Open Photoshop, navigate to the location of the image you will be editing, open it, and let's get started.

That's the basic workflow to process your smoke photography. There are, however, many changes you can make to it including skipping the invert process and leaving out the gradient all together. You may also want to apply some dodge/burn techniques to highlight certain areas. Get creative and experiment with the steps above to come up with your personal favorite. Post your results in the comments section below and be sure to include any tips you discover during your editing for others to try!

Tiffany Mueller is a professional music and fine art photographer. She has been published in various publications including magazines, art journals, as well as photography books. Tiffany is fortunate enough to have been in a perpetual state of travel since her youth and is currently working on a 50-states project. You can keep up with Tiffany via Twitter, Google+ or, on her personal blog, Life Is Unabridged.

Tiffany Mueller is an adventurer and photographer based in Hawaii. When she's not climbing volcanoes or swimming with sharks, you can find her writing articles and running the official blog at PhotoBlog.

Fog and smoke are two of the most mysterious and breathtaking phenomena to exist within our visual world. Whether it's the cold silent curtain or the simmering dance of fumes, we've all stopped to admire how they transform our environments around us. In photography, their presence alone can dramatically enhance a subject's appearance, and in today's tutorial we'll be stepping into Photoshop and exploring the three different ways that you can digitally add fog and smoke to your favorite photos.

The first editing technique we'll cover is with Photoshop's cloud filter, and to start we're going to build out a simple order of layers. Load your image into Photoshop and then create a duplicate background layer by highlighting your original background layer and using the shortcut CMD/CTRL + J. The reason we're making this duplicate is because the original background layer preserves the raw data of your image, which you never want to irreversibly alter or damage. After this, create a new transparent layer above it by selecting Layer > New > Layer and rename it to "fog." Your layer order should now look like the image below.

Now with this initial layer setup complete we can add our fog. Select your Fog layer, press D on your keyboard (which will switch your active colors a.k.a. "foreground" and "background" colors to black and white) and then navigate to Filter > Render > Clouds.

As you can see, a black and white image with randomly generated clouds will appear. The reason why the clouds are black and white is because the white parts will signify where the clouds will show in the image and the black parts will signify where they won't. This will make even more sense when we apply the next step, which is to go to fog layer's blend mode and select screen.

The blending of the fog now looks far better, however it will still need a bit of fine tuning to make it look realistic. Lower the opacity of the fog layer to bring it within natural levels, and then create a layer mask within the fog layer.

You can also remove a lot of the gray, muddier mid-tones by highlighting the fog layer, pressing CTRL/CMD + L , and adjusting the contrast levels. It might also look more realistic to blur the fog by going to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur, especially if you want the fog to be out of focus.

There's also another way to adjust the contrast for your fog layer, which is my personal preference, and that is by creating a curves layer above it and then holding the ALT button down and clicking the divider line between the curves layer and the fog layer. This creates a clipping mask which will connect the two layers and make any adjustments to the curves layer also effect the fog layer it's attached to.

And voil! You have now just accomplished the awesome feat of creating realistic fog with Photoshop's cloud filter! Try it out on a few more photos to get a feel for it, and also experiment with the fog's opacity and adjustment layers to see all the different ways it can appear.

The second Photoshop technique we'll talk about uses almost all of the same steps as the cloud filter process, but instead of using Photoshop's built-in cloud texture we'll be using a real, more detailed image. Go to any stock image website, like iStock, Canstock, or Shutterstock (or better yet, go to Adobe Stock and sign up for a free trial where you can get ten images for free) and download a fog or smoke picture. You can also set up a low key studio setting and make one yourself if you'd like. Just like the cloud filter process earlier though, make sure the clouds are white and the background is black (transparent can work too).

Now let's jump back into Photoshop and build the same initial layer order as before. Make your background copy layer, place your new fog/smoke stock image above it (in my example I'm using a smoke image so I'll rename it "smoke"), change the blend mode to screen, and then adjust the contrast by pressing CTRL/CMD + L or create a curves clipping mask.

For some extra color control, make a Black/White adjustment layer and clip that to the smoke layer as well to neutralize any noticeable hues. In some smoke images you can usually find blue and yellow hues hidden inside.

That was pretty easy right? And I'm sure your image looks great! Not only does this editing process work for fog and smoke, but it also applies to a massive number of other textures, like fire, sparks, snow, and more. Feel free to snag some other stock images and drop them into the photo too. Just remember to use images with a black background.

The third and final way to create realistic fog and smoke in Photoshop is with pre-made brushes. These brushes will allow you to paint the texture directly onto an image and are especially helpful for scenarios like having smoke come out of a cigarette or steam rising out of a hot cup of coffee.

To download your brushes we'll be visiting a free industry trusted website called brusheezy.com. In the search bar, type in "smoke brushes" and download whichever pack you prefer. My personal favorites are from the "real smoke" series, which have incredible detail.

Let's go back to Photoshop to try out our new brush. Open an image that you would like to work on, give it a duplicate background layer, place a new transparent player above it and rename it "smoke", and then press B to select your brush tool.

Now open your Brush Settings Panel (which looks like a folder with a brush icon on it), go to the fly-out menu and select the Bushes tab, click on the three lines in the top right corner, and click Import Brushes...

Navigate back to where you saved your new smoke brush preset and after selecting it you'll see a new folder show up in Photoshop's brush menu. Expand that new folder and your brushes will be waiting inside!

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