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In the first part of this tutorial on smoke photographs, I taught you how to take the actual photographs. Hopefully you’ve gone out and had some fun capturing some easy and beautiful smoke images. Now I’ll show you how to take those images to the next level and really make them pop. Let’s get to it. The first thing you’ll need is Adobe Photoshop. If you don’t have Photoshop and want to use another tool, you’ll need to figure out the steps as you go.

Step one, load up the image in Photoshop. Easy enough, I don’t even need to give you instructions on that. Here’s my original image:

Step two, create a levels adjustment layer above the background layer to set the exposure for the image and make that black background truly black. In the original image it likely looks black, but isn’t truly black. You do this by clicking the little black and white circle at the bottom of the layers palette and choosing “Levels”. Once the dialog window opens, click the black dropper and click a black area of the image. This tells Photoshop what you want black to be, and it makes it truly black. Make sure you don’t skip this step, as if you don’t do it, the rest of the steps will be messed up big time! Here’s the levels adjustment layer dialog:

Step three, clean up the image. If you’re like me, some of your images will have stray smoke that you find distracting or some bits of ash that light up like stars. This is easy to fix. Just go to the background layer, and use the brush tool with a color of black and paint out any unwanted smoke or ash pieces. For ash bits that are in the smoke, make use of the healing brush tool. This is great practice for when you’re retouching those family portraits and need to remove a pimple or two! Once you’ve finished the cleanup work, you can either be happy with the image and be finished, or move on to make it even more glitzy! Here’s my cleaned up image:

Step four, invert the exposure. This is an optional step, but I always do it to see if I like it better. Create a new adjustment layer like in step two, but choose the “Invert” layer instead of “Levels”. This simply creates a negative of your image. If you like what you see, great! If not, just undo your change or delete the layer. Here’s a screen shot of the process for inverting:

Step five is also optional. If you inverted your image and the smoke looks too light, try creating another adjustment layer, but use curves. Using this you can darken the smoke to make it more visible and appealing.

Step six, colorize the smoke. Yet again, create an adjustment layer, but use the “Hue/Saturation” option. Once the dialog opens, check the “Colorize” box and start fooling with the Saturation and Hue sliders. This will change the color and color intensity of the smoke. Leave the Lightness slider alone as it will change the lightness of the whole image, including the background. Here’s a screen shot of the dialog:

And here’s what I got after changing the hue and saturation:

There’s one final optional step that I’d suggest you try, as you might really like the results. Mirror the image. If you don’t like it, just undo it, but you might really like it. To do this, create a copy of the background layer by holding it and dragging it to the new layer button on the layers palette. While that layer is selected, change the blending drop down to “Lighten”. You won’t see any change yet. Now go to the Edit menu and choose Transform >> Flip Horizontally. Now you’ll see the mirrored effect. Here’s a screen shot of the blending:

And here’s the final image:

This is the basic sequence for processing smoke images. There are lots of things you can do with this. You can fool with the contrast, selectively color sections of smoke using combinations of hue/saturation layers, and much more. Experiment, have fun, and most importantly, put your comments and your own tricks in the comments sections of this tutorial.