Colorful Smoke

Today’s phototip covers some additional post-processing to give a new look to your smoke art photography. Lets walk through the steps in Photoshop that takes the black background with bluish smoke and turns it into a white background with multi-colored smoke.

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1. Follow the steps that I posted yesterday to get your shot.

2. Open the image in Photoshop.

3. Now, we want to make the background white. As we already have a black background, changing it to white is as simple as inverting the colors, black being the opposite of white. To do that we can use Cmd-I on a Mac or Ctrl-I on a PC. (In case it’s not clear, that’s I for ice cream, not L) Voila, our black is now white. If there are patches of off-white they can be made white with a simple Levels adjustment.

4. Next, we need to duplicate the layer. Cmd/Ctrl – J will do that for us. You’ll now have 2 layers – the background and layer 1.

5. With layer 1 active (it’ll be the highlighted one), we need to select the smoke. There are a number of different ways to select things in Photoshop, and everyone has their preferred way of doing it so feel free to use your method of choice. I found the simplest way was by selecting the white background (I used Select > Color Range) and inverting the selection (Cmd/Ctrl – Shift – I).

6. Next take the gradient tool. Simply press the G key and you’ll have it. In the options bar at the top, choose a colored gradient and drag the tool inside the image from bottom left/right to top right/left over the smoke. It’ll now look like a solid multicolored mess.

7. The next step is to change the layer blending mode to color. Flatten the image (Layer > Flatten or Shift – Cmd/Ctrl -E to merge them).

8. If you want to, you can invert the colors again to go back to a black background.

Alternate version of colorful smoke

9. To give it a different look, it’s simply a matter of mirroring the image. Again, there are numerous ways to do this. The simplest is probably to open a new document that’s double the width and paste the smoke picture onto it. Then, go back to the smoke image, flip the image (Image > Rotate Canvas > Flip Horizontal/Vertical). Then simply paste this onto the new document and align the two halves. Flatten and crop as desired.

Smoke Mirror

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