Well, here you will be taught how to create a relistic smoke effect with Photoshop. Before you start you should know this effect requires alot of guessing and trial and error to make it look good.
1. Ok first open a new window. I used 300x200 pixels. With a blue background. The first thing you want to do is make the shape of the smoke. Click on the Lasso Tool and draw a zig zag shape. Make should the shape you create is on a separate layer then the background. Next you want to fill in your shape with the Linear Gradient Tool.
2. The gradient tool is selected in this image to the left. For the colors I picked white and black. Next Fill in the shape. And you should have something that looks like this below.
3. Now that you have the shape of your smoke its time to make it look like smoke. Click on Filter > Distort > Wave
Heres where the quessing comes into play. In the wave window you can make the shape look anyway you want using the sliders, but i choose to use the randomize button instead and just keep hitting it until its a shape that I like.
4. Once you get the shape to look the way you want it to, you have to fade the smoke so its not so visible. There are two steps to the way I fade my smoke.
First I go back to Filter and click on Fade Wave. A box will pop up. I usually make mine opacity between 50-70 %. Next go to the the layer that your smoke is on, in the Layer Window, and you'll see another Opacity box. I made mine 50% in this smoke tutorial.
5. Here is what my final result looks like. This is a hard tutorial to learn basically because there is so much trial and error in it. It took me a few tries before i was able to get a good smoke effect.
And here is one of my other smoke effects. Many effects went into this to make it look like that.
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