Photography Tips

Neil Wade has a pretty sweet lighting tutorial over at his blog that teaches you how to photograph incense smoke and make some cool smoke art. So I thought I’d take it a step further and look at an alternative post-processing method to which results in the below picture.

So 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.

1. Follow the steps that Neil details 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. Then, 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.

9. As an added bonus step, hit Cmd/Ctrl - I again to once more invert the colors. It’ll look like this.

And there you have it. Your very own rainbow smoke.

Feedback is always welcome, especially on these tutorials as I’ve only just started this section on the site. Is the above easy enough to follow, or is it too basic or too difficult? Would it be easier to understand if I posted screenshots of the steps? Let me know if there’s anything you’d like to see, learn etc.