D1 Tutorial 5 Sara

I am going to demonstrate how to create the image of a person out of smoke. I saw this done on a website and thought the finished product looked really neat.

First thing you need to do is find a photo of a person or thing that you want to make out of smoke. I am using a person and I chose a photo in profile because features would be hard to make out when creating with smoke. Also you need to find good stock photos of smoke. I have one shown below but you will want several to vary the patterns of the smoke.

Before you do anything duplicate the background layer. Now you will need to create a new layer than use to photobucket tool to make it black.

Now you can scoot the duplicated background layer over to create space to the right of the head. This I wanted to do just to have the effect of trailing hair. It is optional.

Now you are ready to start overlaying the smoke to create the desired image. Start placing the smoke where the head is and where you want wispy trails to go and lower the opacity to 50%

Now you can start shaping the smoke to fit the outline of the face. Go to edit - Tranform and choose warp. Pull the image around to get the general shape and then for finer detail select a portion of the image at a time to create a better shape. The second image below is the nose that I selected to redefine.

Once you have redefined each portion so you are happy with it your image should look something like this.

Now to make it stand out a little flatten the smoke to create one layer and then duplicate the layer. Go to  filter - distort - diffuse glow. This made the smoke brighter and sharper. I than moved the filtered layer under the regular smoke layer to mute it a little.

Now as you can see in the photo if you look at it enlarged there are lines from the connecting images that still stand out even after the shifting. These are easily fixed by choosing the smudge tool on the sidebar. Make sure the selection tool is reasonably small and hardness is all the way down. Soften some edges move the smoke around. Flatten your image when you are happy with it.