Colorful Smoke Art

Starting with a simple black-and-white picture of smoke, you will be making colorful abstract images.

This key to this technique is the Difference blending mode, which I've never had much use for. With a little experimentation, it can yield some very nice color combinations.

1. Start with this close up of smoke on a black background:

2. Double-click the background layer to create a new editable layer. Add a Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer (Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Hue/Saturation) and use the following settings to turn the smoke blue:

3. Right-click the hue/saturation layer and click 'Merge Down' to combine the layer and color.

Now you should have one layer that looks like this:

4. Duplicate your layer (Ctrl+J) and set the blending mode of the new layer to 'Difference'. At first, this will turn the image black, but that will soon change. Move the new layer over to the right 50 pixels or so, and colors should appear again.

5. Add a Hue/Saturation layer to the new layer (like in step 2). Make sure 'Preview' is checked, and move the Hue slider back and forth until you like the result. Here's what I used:

For this result:

6. Right click the Hue/Saturation layer and 'Merge Down' (like in step 3). Duplicate your newly merged layer. You should now have 3 layers of smoke and an image like this.

7. To add some variation, I used a 'Pinch' filter (Filters > Distort > Pinch) on the 3rd layer with this setting:

Which should produce this:

8. You can continue to make the image more complex by adding more layers. Let's do one more. Duplicate the 3rd layer. With your new layer, go to Edit > Transform > Distort. Grab each corner handle and pull them outward to make this layer a little wider and differently shaped than the others. Here's roughly how I did it:

And enjoy the end result:

9. It's easy to switch the layers around, try out different blending modes and hue/saturation layers to get a variety of images. Here are a couple variations:

Try an extra layer with 'Color Dodge' blending mode to get a brighter look:

10. Let's try one with a different smoke pattern. Start with this beautiful image I found on Flickr. Here is the page it came from: original image. It is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution.

Check out the photographer's work here - it's awesome.

11. Add a hue/saturation layer, then merge it with the smoke layer.

For this result:

12. Duplicate this layer and add a hue/saturation layer.

The 2nd layer should now be purple. Merge it with the hue/saturation layer as we've been doing.

13. Change the blending mode of the 2nd layer to Difference, then move it a few pixels away from the 1st layer so green and purple are both visible.

14. Do the same 'duplicate > hue/saturation > merge down > set blending mode to difference' routine one more time to make another layer that is blue. Here are the hue/saturation settings:

And how your image should look now:

15. Finally, add a 'Twirl' filter (Filter > Distort > Twirl) to the top blue layer:

16. And you're done!