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Tutorial : Colored Smoke Art.

Posted on November 23, 2009 by ramit in Tutorials | 15 Comments

Tutorial: Colored Smoke

I am sure Smoke Art pictures have fascinated you. And you always had this question in mind – How can smoke look so beautiful? And if you are one of those, who have gone a step further to actually click pictures of smoke – You must have been wondering – How do you get Red & Green Colored Smoke? Or those Lovely Pinks!

Well, let me try and simplify some of the mysteries of thy Artsy Smoke.

This article comes from my personal experiences of Smoke Photography. There is no ‘Perfect’ way to capture/color or create smoke. But after a constant trial and error, I have found these to be the most convenient of ways.

The Setup

Creating Smoke:  The best way to get a good Volume of Smoke is to use Incense sticks.

Background: A fairly Dark Non-Shiny Background. As close to Black as you can manage. (Black Velvet is my personal Favourite.)

Light: Using a Slave Light with a Snoot aimed at the Smoke. (Personally, I have achieved the best of smoke shots with Sunlight coming from a window, controlling it with a Cardboard with a small slit). You will have to be really careful as to prevent light from falling on the background and your camera-lens.

Ventilation: Make sure you have a good Exhaust system to drive the smoke out of your room. This is one area which is so commonly ignored by people shooting smoke.  Firstly, A lot of smoke will make sure light is illuminating areas which you donot want, and also reduce the contrast due to the haze.  And Secondly, too much smoke in a closed room is a very unhealthy practice. (*Also make sure your smoke sensors are resting for a while.)

Camera/Lens: I prefer shooting with a 50mm and a 100mm Prime lens stopping down to f/8 to get sharp streaks of smoke. Since you would not have enough time to focus and look at beautiful loops of smoke at the same time, make sure your camera is installed on a tripod, and manually focus the range you expect your smoke to be visible.

1-01 : Light & Camera Setup

Pic 1-01 Shows a typical Light & Camera Setup that I use.

If you are shooting in a fairly dark room, with good ventilation and a controlled source of light, you would be happy with your results. I cannot emphasize enough on the fact that any bounce of light can ruin the contrast in your pictures. So make sure only the smoke gets the light.

The other thing to keep in mind is to keep the Smoke column steady. If your room is closed on all sides and there is no abrupt movement in your room, chances are, you will be able to see straight columns of rising smoke. This may seem great at first, but redundant pictures get real boring. You may want to send  a small gush of wind towards your smoke stream to get interesting loops. You can do this by waving a piece of paper or by simply blowing some wind near the smoke.

The trick is to find the right balance between air turbulence and stillness.

Post-Production with Photoshop

Bravo! So you finally managed to get some great smoke pictures. Before you proceed further, try and sort out your sharply focused and interestingly shaped smoke pictures out of the lot.

If you got the setup right, you would have pictures like this one (I am sure, much better!), right out of your camera!

*Don’t Worry, if you didn’t manage to get a workable file from your shoot. Feel free to Download this file to Practice your Colored Smoke -

Test File for Download - Click to Open the file in Full Resolution, and Save.

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1-11 : Straight from the Camera

The problem with this picture will be clearly visible, once we proceed to the next few steps.

Open this picture in Photoshop, and Invert the picture using Image>Adjustments>Invert or hotkey Ctrl-I. The image should look similar to the one below [1-12].

1-12: Inverted Image

If you look carefully at the blank space in the image, it is not as white as we would want it to be. This is because it is extremely difficult to have a perfect Black background in the first place. Some light always manages to seep in the background. And thus, the inverted image is not perfectly white.

Let us correct this first. Go to Image>Adjustments>Levels or use the hotkey Ctrl-L. Click the 3rd (Extreme Right) Eyedropper icon. (Refer image 1-13.) And click on the blank space of the image as shown. This should help you get a perfect white.

1-13: Setting the White Point

Looking better. Ain’t it? But the details are not as clear as the ones you saw at that oh-so-cool website with Smoke pictures. So lets work on them next.

Make a copy of the just modified layer by going to Layer>Duplicate Layer… And Change the Blend mode of the Duplicate layer to Multiply. Don’t hesitate to add multiple copies of this layer with Multiply Mode selected. I am sure your current file looks similar to this (1-14).

1-14: Making Details Stand out with 'Multiply'

By the time I reach here, I start to see great details in the smoke. And more often than not, start seeing beautiful shapes and figures. But sometimes there are patches which I would not want to see in my final art print. This is when you should clean up what you don’t like. With a Soft White Brush Paint over the areas you don’t like, and get a cleaner looking image.

1-15: Clean Up

I Painted White over the areas marked with a Red Circle.

Once you are done cleaning up your image, its time to flatten all the layers you created so far. You can do this by Going to Layer> Flatten Image.

At this time, I am almost ready to color the image. I would go back and forth the Multiply & Paint with white procedures, till the time I am happy with the look of the image. By this time, you need to be clear about what you are focusing on. What shapes you want to stand out, and what shapes you want to omit. Don’t forget to save older versions of your file, You might want to consider looking back at how the smoke looked 5 iterations earlier.

After a lot of Paint-overs & Multiply-Layers, your smoke art would start to look like this now -

1-16: Ready to Paint

Now comes my favourite part of Adding color to the Smoke Art. There is no single technique that is guaranteed to give you an out-of-the-world result. But this particular method has always given me interesting results to work with.

1-17: The Mighty Gradient

This is the Magic Trick. All you need to do is -

1.  Select your Smoke layer and Select the Gradient Tool from the Tool List on the Left of your Workspace.

2.  Select Radial Gradient as a Type for this Gradient.

3.  Change the Mode to Overlay

4.  Select your color combinations (Like that shown in 1-18)

5.  Now get ready to click. I prefer keeping the start point of the Smoke Trail to be the Click 1 and place the Second Click around where the Trail ends.

This Color Gradient would give you an effect similar to this one here -

1-18: Color Combinations

Bravo! Did you just create some fantastic looking Smoke Art!!

If you followed the guidelines closely, I am sure you managed to get great looking Colored Smoke pictures. If you still have and Queries or Doubts, Please feel free to Comment in reply to this post.

Thank You!

You can have a look at my Smoke art Pictures here – http://www.flickr.com/photos/ramitbatra/

Crouching Dragon

Tags: adobe, art, camera, colored, free, how to, layer, multiply, paint, photo, photography, photoshop, post production, smoke, tutorial