Photoshop smoke tutorial

Basically i spent a large portion of my evening trying to make blue mist for my new user name and almost all of the guides i googled weren't too helpful so i mixed and matched and I'm going to share my improved guide with you all for my first complete Instructable.

Step 1: Setting up

1. Open up a new document in Photoshop,
2. Make it any size you want,
3. Where it says "Background Contents" set that to white,
4. Click Okay,
5. Use the Paint Bucket tool to make the background layer black
6. Create a new transparent layer

Comments

[Blue Mist]

1. Check you have CS5 the German version may not have a randomize button.
2. Don't touch any of this the one it auto selects is correct.
3. Yes.
4. I did it roughly a dozen times, Did you remember to do the wave and the fade wave repeatedly or did you just continuously fade the wave?

[Heliosphan]

Same here TechGadgets.
I'm trying this out in Photoshop CS6 beta. Looks rubbish and I feel that Blue Mist is missing a whole ton of stuff out -
1 - It matters what size the image is for the Gaussian blur and Maximum to work at radius 9 pixels.
2 - It matters what brush sizes you use.
3 - It matters that the brush strokes needs to be a shade of grey to begin with.
4 - The dodge and burn tools appear to have very little effect on the end result.
5 - Both the Gaussian Blur and Maximum might need to be different than 9, even two very different numbers possibly.
6 - the Wave Distort dialog box is full of adjustable parameters, of which Blue Mist fails to mention at all, and the defaults just don't work, no matter how many times you repeat steps 3-5.

I'm not trying to be demeaning here, you just need to be a shedload more detailed in your descriptions than that!

[tutdude98]

and then save that picture as brush :D

[Blue Mist]

To save it as a brush you would need to do it without the black background, it would be do-able but rather hard to get the smoke looking right.

[TechGadgets]

You just could remove the black bachground afterwards and use the pic later for anothe projekt.

[tutdude98]

well i making smoke in a diffrent way ( with white backround but it looks nicer with black )

[TechGadgets]

How do you make smoke?

[tutdude98]

sorry its too long and complicate

[TechGadgets]

._. you're damn lazy...

[TechGadgets]

What a shame that this got only less than 500 views up to now. I always wondered how to make smoke, but I was to lazy to look it up. This helped me a lot. I don't understand what you did at last in step 2.

[Blue Mist]

The dodge tool on photoshop makes things lighter its like a brush tool, you just use it to add random patterns to your "Squiggle" and the same applys to the burn tool which darkens. only 500 views? :O my last instructable had 3 and i made this one like not long ago at all, its now featured and i got 3 months pro, i'm well suprised :D

[TechGadgets]

Thanks. Will try it out when I'm back at my PC.
I was just surpriced because I got for my first instructable featured and more than 1000 views after two days so I thought that would be normal when featured.

[TechGadgets]

Now I tried it but somehow it doesn't look nearly as goog as yours :( .
I'm done with step 2, you see the result below.
The Gaussian blur looks korrect as well.
But now...
1. There isn't a randomize buttom anywhere, does it need to be activated?
2. It asks weather I want it diagonal, concentric or circular (I've the German version so I translated it into english)
3. Fade wave opens a window. Should I put this opacity to 50%?
4. How often did you repeat that? I tryed it a few times and it look not better but even worse.

I hope you can help me.

By the way: you maybe should mention it has to be an 8-bit picture a 16-bit does not work.

[TechGadgets]

forgot the pic ._.