Creating Smoke In Photoshop From Scratch
Using Photoshop and a specific technique, it’s rather easy to create something that looks like smoke or fog—from scratch. It’s not as good as actual smoke photographed on a black background, but it’s much easier to come by. Here’s the trick…
Doodle
Draw a doodle. Preferrably keep the doodle in its own layer with a black background beneath.
Distort
Use the Liquify tool to distort the doodle. Liquify resides in the Filter > Liquify... menu. Using the various “forward warp”, “twirl” and “pucker” tools residing in the menu to the left, you distort the doodle as if you were fingerpainting.
Once you’ve applied the liquify transformation, select Edit > Fade Liquify.... In the dialog box that appears, set the opacity to 50% and apply.
Repeat
Now repeat the process until you’re satisfied:
- Liquify
- Fade Liquify to 50%
If you enjoyed this tutorial, you might also enjoy my Creating Microworlds in Photoshop tutorial.
- Stream of Consciousness #4
- Creating Smoke In Photoshop From Scratch
- Single Illustration Deconstruction
- May 2007 Installment: Finale
Great! What a great way to “make some smoke” Or fog. I didn’t know it seems so easy. I thought that one had to go through a lot more just to get some smoke.
nice shortcut methods !!
like it
cheers !
Hi there,
wonderful idea
cheers and cheerio
niice werk cap’n. helluh-uh useful.
Very pretty! Found it useful, thanks.
This is so ratical I know I spelt it wrong
Great and easy way to create some smoke..
Love it!!
(Stumble send me here)
Found your through stumble upon and really enjoyed this tutorial. I will definitely use it again in the future!
Flippin’ marvelous.
Love the effect. Cheers.
An excellent method of enhancing the crap resuls of ‘nearly made it’ smoke shots
definately diggworthy!!!
great smoke tutorial
Very cool!
I don’t use whatever digg is…. but I do Stumble… and its certainly worthy of a ‘like’ on stumble.
thanks for the GREAT post! Very useful…
Very informative and useful. I have to try this soon.
Thanks
Thanks, you made my day! Just what I was looking for.
This is without a doubt one of the best and most natural looking Smoke effects I’ve found in my searches.
The effect is just what I’ve been looking for.
This tutorial ROCKS
These is a very helpful tutorial indeed… Great work! Thanks for the resource.
brilliant (come on arsenal)
Great technique, will certainly be using this on my next website design. Stumbled it! -thumbs up!
SIMLPY BRILLIANT.Thanks a lot….this will be invaluable.
Got to tell you that this tutorial is the sh@t
Greats work ;) Thank you.
Doesn’t look like smoke to me. Looks like a cloudy photoshop scribble.
Nice try though. You could probably get it to look more like actual smoke with those techniques if you did more by hand rather than letting the program do it.
Great tutorial! Wish I would have found it two days ago for a project I was working on.
Nice tutorial to create smoke using Liquify technique in photoshop. Overall nice post Joen, keep it up….
Excellent, I used it to make “smell smokes” on a cartoon with food in it :)
Thanks!