Le Smóke (I'm sure that's french)
1. Firstly you want to make a helper line, from the source of the smoke to the end. Tends to make it easier in the long run.
2. Using the same brush we used with fire, choose the first color for the smoke. This will be the overall color or the base color of the smoke. As the background is quite light in my shot, I go with almost black.
3. Brush in the smoke all along the helper line, sort of a side to side method have worked the best for me when applying the first color, the shape is more random that way. Also, the smaller the brush the better, but don't go too small, think I used 8-10 here. Also, make the center of the smoke thicker, so you can't see through it.
4. Next, take out the
smudge tool and smudge the smoke, I used the same settings as with the fire. We'll smudge the first color twice, the first time we just make it smoother and remove all the sharpness caused by the brush (
blur filter might work here too)...
... and the second time, I like to make the smoke look a bit like a feather, pushing the smoke outwards with short fast strokes. Gives it a nice wispy look.
5. For the first color, now we just need to duplicate the layer, pop it beneath the original and give it
gaussian blur, in this case I went with 15.
6. The last thing to do with smoke is what we did with fire: add different shades of grey to it on new layers and smudge them in. I used 2 new layers, the first being only slightly lighter shade, with larger brush I added just a little bit of it in few spots, the second color was much lighter shade which I applied with smaller (5-7) brush all along the top of the smoke to simulate light coming from above.
That's it for the smoke, really. Experiment around and with some time spent it can be made to look very nice.
Here's the finished tutorial shot with added layer blending (color dodge @ 60% for fire and screenshot). Total time was around 11 minutes on this.
