I’ve received several requests from readers for the original, raw versions of some of my smoke photographs. It would seem that some readers don’t have easy access to a place to do photos of smoke.

Taking the actual photos of smoke is the easy part. The post processing is the time consuming and tricky part. And this is also where you can let your creative juices flow.

So to help you out, I’ve put up 13 untouched smoke photographs on the Sublime Light Flickr photo pool tagged “rawsmoke”. These are presented exactly how they came out of my camera, with zero modifications whatsoever.

So have fun with these. Tweak them, colorize them, do whatever you like. I just have one request: when you’re done, post your results back to the photo pool so that I and everyone else can see them.

And if you’re new here and have no idea what I’m talking about, you can get a quick primer on smoke photography and the gorgeous results you can get by reading the smoke tutorials.

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 tutorial to be featured on the Sublime Light is on how to photograph smoke photographs. Photos of smoke are amazingly beautiful, extremely easy to take, and can really take on some interesting shapes. Everyone who looks at a smoke picture sees something different, which is one of the best parts. Where one person will see an angel, another will see a demon. This is a great way to get creative with photography without a lot of equipment commitment.

I’ll show you step by step how to photograph smoke, then how to process the pictures using Photoshop to really make them stand out. So enough already, let’s get started!