Making fire

Simulating various mother nature's happenings is probably most attractive task for everyone who take computer for its realization. The problem with computer is that he's, on every question, trying to give perfect results. But, our eyes don't fall on those tricks, revealing every detail.

Like you can see in the title, in this tutorial, we'll entertain ourselves with one very important element of nature - fire. Few hundred years ago, it wasn't very easy for man to make a fire. Luckily, time has changed. Photoshop will, with its extremly usable tools make our job easier. In matter of minutes, you'll "heat" yourself using only keyboard and mouse. Let's get to work.

Make a new document, size doesn't matter, with a white background. In my example, I've made it with 1500x10 px. Main form of fire, we'll make with Clouds filter which is located under menu Filters/Render. This filter make a random pattern in grey tones, which are very similiar to fog or cloud, what we can use in our next step. To make a kind of fire which is throwing its particles in air, we'll use one more filter called Polar Coordinates, located under menu Filter/Distort:



Check option Polart to Rectangular and press Ok. We made a distortion of picture which can be seen more on the upper part, so whole thing now looks like shape of fire, which we need. Even with that, we must work on its realistic.

Flame is very hot, on itself, because of extremly high temperature, which is "pushing" it to all its energy realize in light, relativly with very various intesities. So, we must add our flames a specific "glow" and contrast. Best solution for this is filter Accented Edges, which is located under menu FIlter/Brush Strokes. When his dialog opens, be sure to set Accented Edges in the fall menu. Value Edge width set on 5, Edge Brightness should be 38 and Smothness to 15 and press Ok. Result should be like on next picture:



Okey, our flame is getting more realistic, but the lack of colors seems it very "cold" and unnatural.
We'll "heat" whole thing with one more filter, and that's Lighting Effects (Filter/Render menu):

First, set the Light Type to Omni, and set Intensity to 35, and on the Preview window (small part of the Lighting effects dialog situated on the left side) you can see how our unfinished fire react on these values and parameters. To get the effect that our flame is heater in the bottom part, and gentle on top part, we'll move our light source to bottom edge of the picture. If you don't understand just make it all like on the picture below. His range, which is presented as a perfect ellipse, we're going to enlarge its radius to take at least half width of the picture. Let's get back to parameter editing. In the Properties frame, set the Gloss value to 84, which will disperse light on the surface. Then, set the Material value to 69, which will raise contrast. Parameter Exposure should be gently enlarged to 10, where we'll get on the whole lighting of the picture. Last parameter, Ambience, should be of value 8. At the end, we only have to choose colors of the fire. Click on the first ColorBox (on the frame Light Type), and in the Color Picker choose orange-like color. On our example that color is (R:243, G:126, B:31). In the frame Properties do same like you did on last ColorBox, only difference is that we need red-like color here (R:237, G:33, B:35). Clicking the Ok button, you'll excute Lighting Effects filter and our fire is lighten up.



We've seen that combination of a few filters is possible to make better results than it was on the beginning. Happily, every filter is occupated by a little Preview window, which is making our job much easier. After making this fire, you have rights to call yourself "digital fireman". Hope you liked tutorial, in the next tutorial you'll learn to make something like ice or something. Enjoy your stay on the blog, and bye bye 'till next time.