| Tutorial Title: How to create a burning letter |
| Program: PS 5+ |
Intro: First, let me say that this tutorial is a little bit harder than some of my other tutorials. This is because I assume you know Photoshop a bit. I tried to use Filters where ever they are possible, but a lot of the step require you to produce the effects on your own using basic tools like smudge and burn. You might want to read the Paint Shop Pro version of this tutorial located in my PSP tutorial page. |
| Step 1: Make a new image with any dimensions you like. I usually use something around 500X500 pixels. Set your colors to default. Using the text tool, type out something, for now keep it something simple like one letter. Use a nice big font, I used Arial Black. Photoshop 6+ users have to now rasterize their text layer. Using the freehand selection tool, draw a jagged crooked selection along the border of your letter like in the the picture below (the image below has been zoomed in, you do not need to make your letter this large... you should size and postion your letter like in the picture in step 2).
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| Step 2: Make a new layer. Set your foreground color to a red color, and background to a orange color. Turn on the letter's selection by Command (CTRL for Windows users) clicking on the letter's layer. Using the airbrush and a medium sized brush fill the bottom of your selection with some red and then draw a strip of orange above the red.
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| Step 3: You might want to add a little amount of motion blur to your airbrushing to give it some depth. Add a small amount of noise to make it look like its sizzling. |
| Step 4: Make a new layer. Load up the text layer's selection by command/ctrl clicking it's layer. Fill it with an orange/yellow color. Make a big rectangle selection that goes from the bottom of your letter to the top of your document. Feather the selection by about 40 pixels. |
| Step 5: Apply a motion blur of about 50 or so, it depends on your image and how you like the results. Then using the smudge tool, distort the motion blur to achieve a wavy fire like flame. Set the leyer mode to Multiply or Colorburn, again this depends on your image's colors and your taste. I used Multiply for my exaple. Using the burn tool, darken the bottom a bit to get a nice red bottom. ;] You might want to use the dodge tool at the top, I didn't though, but you might want to give it a try. |
| Step 6: Do a little more tweaking and you'll have a burning layer. I added some smoke to my letter to make it look better. The smoke was created using the Airbrush. I just created a new layer that was set to multiply with a 75% opacity, then I used different shades of gray and different sized brushes and simply drew out the smoke. When you are saving the image for the web, it sometimes looks nice if you make it a compressed GIF, this is because the dithering method used for GIFs make the letter/text look like its more fire like or sizzling. |
