Smoke Effect

This tutorial was requested from a PhotoshopDesign.NET viewer 'Lex' of Playbook Muzik. Here is a short tutorial on how to create a smoke effect. Create a new blank layer above your base layer in the layers palette.

Now choose the brush tool (B) and go to View: Brushes to bring up your brush palette. Choose a soft brush to create the smoke effect with and you can use these settings. This is one way to produce this effect.

In the brush palette you can choose to scatter it some more to make it more random. Choose a brush size that will make sense for creating some smoke. Start off smaller and then later we will use the Ctrl [ ] keys to enlarge the brush size to expand the smoke.

 

Choose the airbrush option in the brush options bar.

Now simply create some brush strokes on this blank layer (with white or light grey as the foreground color). Spread them apart to appear puffy and then create a larger brush size the further away from the source that you get.

 

Go ahead and also change the opacity of the brush. This will allow a lighter effect and you can keep holding the brush down and spread it across more of the document to create a smoky effect. With the airbrush on, it duplicates the effect of an airbrush because the longer you hold (click) down on a certain area it keeps painting...it saturates more.

 

Go ahead and spread some more of the airbrushed smoke on a larger brush size and change the opacity to an even lower setting. Now it's really all 'smoke' and you can create a really large brush size to spread this smoke around & away from the original source (what's in that cup anyways?)

You can also go to filter: blur: motion blur to help the effect.

Here is the original image (from the ClubCast portfolio available from Photoshopdesigner.com or here on this site.)

Here we are with the brush created smoke effect layer. By changing the opacity, airbrush and brush size you can manually re-create a smoky effect that looks fairly realistic enough. The fact that the dude already looks stoned just helps the fact...

Here you can see the smokey brush layer (I have Ctrl clicked on the layer icon to show the selection). Now you can go ahead and (re) create some smoke FX in your own work. This is one way of creating this effect. Try it out yourself.  Get this and all the other psd.NET tutorial .psd's from iPSDirectory when you get my Photoshop Designer Training.