Fire in the Night
Using Fire, the Living Light Source
This tutorial is geared toward the intermediate Photoshop artist who already has a basic grasp of the program's interface and tools. You will learn more advanced masking and lighting techniques, plus some hand-drawn illustration techniques to make your images come alive.
Getting Started
I used Photoshop 6 to write this tutorial, but you can use whatever you want, just be aware that some tools might not work exactly the same and you may need to experiment to replicate the effects.
Turning this:
And This:
Into This:
Masking the Fire
Masking an undefined shape using the "color range" selection tool.
Add the fire to a new layer above the cabin background.
Open "select/color range" to load the color range selection tool. Set the fuzziness to approximately 180, leaving all other settings at default. Click on on the darker area of the fire, then hold the "shift" key and click on the bright center to add it to the selection.
With the selection now active, add a layer mask to the campfire layer (the layer mask button is at the bottom of the layer pallet and looks like a rectangle with a circle inside it). Your image should now look something like this:
Making the Fire Fit
Use the Free Transform tool to scale down the fire and move it over the top of the right window. Holding down the "shift" key will allow you to maintain the proportions of the fire while you scale it.
Use the airbrush tool with a nice dark orange color and a small soft brush at low opacity to paint details into the fire to simulate it blowing around the window stiles. Use the smudge tool to lightly cut into the fire base at the stiles to further enhance the effect.
Lighting the Interior With Fire
Use any technique you like to select the window panes and door screen. Create a new layer on top, set the layer blend mode to color dodge, then fill your selection with a bright pale yellow color. This image shows the window light by itself in normal mode on a black background for clarity.
This image shows the layer in color burn mode over the background. Note: I locked transparency and painted darker areas on the lower portions of the windows here to make the light show brightest only in the highest portions of the windows. Heat rises, so does fire, thus the brightest and hottest parts of the fire are up high casting the most light.
More Fire!
Copy the fire layer. Free Transform the new fire layer to shrink it a bit and move it over the door. Use the Liquify or Smudge tool to manually move the new fire around a bit to randomize it's shape; you don't want it to look like a direct copy of the other fire.
Day to Night: Setting up the Light
Since the source of the fire is a night scene, it will be far easier to convert the background to night than it would be to convert the fire to daytime lighting. On this page we will start the night conversion of the rest of the image. You can skip this if you have a better fire picture or don't want to do the night conversion.
Make two copies of the background layer just above the background. Select the lower of the two copies and open the "gradient map" adjustment tool. Create a color pallet of brown, tan, and orange that resembles what I have shown below, then apply the gradient. Use the "levels" tool to brighten the dark woodwork, remember you are creating the lit portions of the image at the moment, so it is important to get some detail in the dark areas.
Day to Night: Setting up the Night
Click on the upper copy of the background to make it active. Open the "hue/saturation" adjustment tool and select "colorize", then move the sliders to acheive a basic indigo tinted image; apply the changes when you are happy with them. Open the "selective color" tool and make further adjustments to the black, neutral, and blue channels to acheive a higher contrast image as shown in the right panel below.
Merging the Light and the Night
Adding Light in the Night
For starters, the windows will never light up if we don't mask out the darkness from them. Hold the "Ctrl" key and click on the window illumination layer; this will automatically select the transparency of the windows. Pretty nifty huh, you didn't even have to save an alpha mask of the windows to do this. With the new selection and the dark layer active, add a layer mask to the dark layer. The lighting on the windows should now come alive. However, the windows are not the only things that need to be lit up; the fire is blowing out the windows and will also light up parts of the exterior structure and surrounding foliage. Deselect the windows and use a soft black brush at low pressure to paint light into the dark image (you are actually just revealing the orange/tan image hidden below). Mask out more where closest to the fire and less the farther you get from it; using a speckle brush will allow you to add lighting details to foliage and fallen leaves.
Mask shown on green background for clarity:
Here is the image as you would see it:
Color Correcting the Fire
Eew, that greenish-yellow on the outside of the fire just does not go with anything. So, let's fix it. Merge the two fire layers together then open the "selective color" tool. Play around with the the sliders for each of the colors to achieve something you think gives more natural life to the fire. Try each color and see what happens, it's a good learning experience that's better if you try for yourself rather than me telling you where to put each and every slider. Anyway, the new colors I've come up with are shown below.
Adding Highlights to the Structure
Fire is bright and tends to leave lots of light on surface joints. Lets add some additional light to the window frames and trim pieces. Make a new blank layer below the fire layer, but above any structure layers. Set the new layer to "screen" mode. Using the line tool with a pale yellow color at low opacity, draw in highlights. Build up successive lines to increase the brightness/thickness for details that are close to the fire. Below is my rendition as applied to the image. Note: I took the liberty of turning out the lights in the leftmost room since it is not yet on fire.
Adding Damage
The fire is pretty, but it should do more than just look nice. It should be tearing stuff up. Lets do some damage here.
Make a new blank layer just below the fire layer. Hide the fire layer so that just the structure layers are showing. With the new blank layer still active, hold the "alt" key and select "merge visible" in the layer pallet menu. This will make a copy of all the visible layers and paste it into the blank layer. Why do this? So we can do some damage without damaging other layers we have worked hard on.
Use the liquify tool on this new layer to distort the shingles. Don't worry about messing up anything else, we will fix that shortly.
Fixing the mess we made on the last page and creating real damage.
Use whatever masking technique you like and mask out a burned out area of the shingles, making sure to return the front trim to normal. Hint, you don't need to clone anything, just mask to reveal the original layers where you don't want the damage to occur. Create a block of black just below your damage layer making sure it doesn't cover the room trim.
This image shows the new damaged area.
Details and lighting to the damaged areas.
Use manual selections to mask and draw in roof joists (upper image). Invert your selection and use an orange airbrush to paint in a "spooky orange glow" between the joists (lower image).
Adding Smoke
If the fire is clean and hot you don't need smoke, but we will add it here anyway.
Make a new layer just under the fire. Select a very dark, almost black, airbrush and paint in some smoke.
Create another blank layer above the smoke but under the fire and set it to "screen" mode. Using a soft medium orange airbrush add highlights and color to the bottom parts of the smoke billows where they might recieve light from the fire. Change the brush clolor to medium red and add more color just above the orange areas.
Blending Smoke and Fire
At the moment the fire looks like it is sitting on top of the smoke. We want the smoke to grow out of the fire so we need to do a minor bit of editing.
Select the fire layer and add a layer mask. Use a large black airbrush at low pressure to fade out the tops of the fires. Click back onto the smoke layer and use a light yellow brush in screen mode to add more light where the fire now hides in the smoke to simulate smoke lit from inside.
Final Touches
I made a new layer on top of all the other layers for the final corrections. Set the new layer to "soft light mode" and using a medium orange airbrush paint color onto the areas that are lit by the flames; be sure to mask out the sky and anything else that is not lit by the flames. Note: I also used the same color with a speckle brush to further add details to the foliage and increase the visibility of the image on darker monitors.
If this were an actual contest image I would remove the daytime shadows, add shadows from the fire, add more damage, and do more with the background. But for the sake of keeping the tutorial somewhat simple I have left these things out, though you would do well to continue on and finish off the little details. Have fun and feel free to send me a message if you have any questions.
--Dakota
