Making Fire in Photoshop

What's up guys! This is mackheads101, and today I'm going to be showing you how to, uh, make fire in Photoshop.

So, first thing, what you're going to do is open up Photoshop and make a new image of about 700 by 1000, or 700 by 700. Now click OK. We're going to have this nice canvas, so what we're going to do is we're going to go to the default color settings, and then we're going to click on the paint bucket tool. You can access that by click-holding the gradient tool and clicking on the paint bucket tool.

Now we're going to single-click; that's going to make our canvas black. Now we're going to make a new layer by either clicking right there or pressing Apple Shift N. So I'm just going to press Apple Shift N. It's going to ask me what my layer name is. I'll call this "fire," and I'm gonna click OK.

Now, we're gonna take the regular marquee tool—that's right there—and we're just going to select the bottom of the image. Don't make it too wide; just make it about an inch up from the bottom. Now we're going to take the first color, the foreground color, and make it red, and then we're going to take our secondary color, or the background color, yellow. So you can just click on yellow, and then we can get there.

Now we're going to make a gradient by selecting the gradient tool. Just hold down your paint bucket tool and click on the gradient tool, and drag down from the top of the image. That's going to give us a nice fiery feel. Don't go from too high; the lower you do it from, the better. The more red you'll see. So we're just gonna do it from about there, so it's about even. There we go!

And what we're going to do, or actually we're going to make a lot of red because we're going to pull up the yellow, something like that. Now you can just click on the regular marquee tool and just click on the image, so that way it's not selected anymore.

Now, what we're going to do is we're going to take our smudge tool. You can access that by clicking on the blur tool and going down to smudge. Then you can right-click by pressing Ctrl-click and go anywhere. Make sure your hardness is set to zero, and your master diameter is set to however big you want your flames to be.

Then what you're going to do is select down and just drag up. You're going to see it's going to start making flames for you. Just keep doing this. If you want your flames to be red, drag up just the top. If you want them to be more yellow like that one, drag all the way from the bottom, and you'll see it'll get more yellow. And if you want to curve it, you can just push it like that. Make them zigzagged however you want, or just turn them like that and just keep doing this.

I'm gonna fast forward this part so you can just see how it'll look. If you want an example of how fire looks, just Google something to copy off of. Just Google search "fire" and Google Images "fire," and you can just copy something. I don't know, like this, maybe something like this.

Okay, so I didn't do this perfect; I was just doing it really quickly. But as you can see, you got the basic feel for fire, and then you can just add, um, I don't know, some stars to your image. You can, by going to the paint box, you could tool reverse it and just make your thing look like stars—smaller stars, a little bit bigger, just add stars. The last two weren't that good, or I don't know, you can do whatever you want for this.

Just okay, so then you got a basic nice background with fire, and there we go! Hope this helped you, and have a nice day. Goodbye!