In this tutorial I'm going to show you how to create some smoke and
apply it to an image, I'm this tutorial we shall be applying the smoke
effect to some cars to give the effect of a race.
For the cars i shall be using the following to screen shots i took from the game juiced. Click here to download the PSD (520Kb)
For
the rest of the tutorial i will be referring to the document as though
I'm just doing the smoke for the drag race effect and wail often refer
to the cars but just take this as your own image. You will be able to
use the effect other images.
Open a a new document large
enough for you image(s) make it slightly bigger than required. for this
example we shall be using a 600x500 (if you go the psd you will already
have it the right size)
Next we must put on the images we
wish to add the effect to. So we just put both cars on the canvas and
off set them so that it gives the racing effect.
Next we create a new layer(press D to reset you colour's) and go to filter>render>clouds
Adjust the opacity setting so that you can see the clouds and the cars behind.( i used 85%)
Now
we don't want smoke all over the image so we shift the image into
position. for this images we want a nice smoke coming from the tyer's
so we just shift the clouds so we have nice white patch at the tires.
Set
the opacity for the layer back to 100%. Now comes the hard bit, take
the erase tool and set it to 35% for both flow and opacity and now we
must rub away the excess to form our smoke. depending on you image you
shape will differ from the one in this effect. use the image below as
guide it will take practice.
We also need some smoke coming from the other car so duplicate the smoke layer and place it behind the 2nd car
Using this technique you can add more smoke or less smoke by adding more smoke layers, and adjusting the opactiy settings.
To
finish the our drag race we need to give an effect of speed. select the
single column marquee tool and create selection down the car in the
background (make sure you have this cars layer selected, also make the
selection have part of the roof in)
Press
ctrl to duplicate your selection onto a new layer, select the move tool
and stretch the strip to cover from one side of you image to the other.
Now put this layer behind your car and repeat for the other car.
Now we must select our background cars stretched pixels and put a layer mask on it the 2nd icon on our layers pallet 
Now get the gradient tool and draw a gradient horizontal off the front of the car so that the lines fade out to wards the edge.
Repeat for the first cars stretched pixels, adjust the opacity of the layers and you should have something like this.
And that is the effect fished.
Aheck out the wallpaper section and have look at the cars wallpaper
where i used the above effect to as the center piece of my image.
