This page is an introduction to smoke and fire. It's mostly about setting objects on fire; creating sheets of fire is a different topic completely.

The fire technique shown here is my variant of a common tip; among other places, you'll find it at the cooltype site. The reason it's here is that I use parts of this technique in the second chroming tutorial.

Start with a black background. Enter your text (or whatever you're going to burn) in white, or fill with white if it's some other color. Call this layer "fire." Duplicate this layer, and hide the copy. (If you're burning something that's already in color, you might want to duplicate first.) Call the duplicate "original object."

Rotate the text layer 90 degrees counterclockwise. Apply the wind filter, giving your image a "blast" from the left.

Rotate 90 degrees clockwise. Now, with preserve transparency off, apply a Gaussian blur of about four pixels, then a ripple filter set at medium. We're making progress; we've made it as far as "smoke."

Save your image! I'm going to show you two different ways to add color, and you'll want to be able to revert to this point later in the tutorial.

Duplicate the background layer, then select the "fire" layer and merge down. Add a new layer above the background, and call it "gradient."

Set your foreground color to yellow (255, 255, 0) and your background color to dark orange (255, 51, 0). Select the gradient tool; make sure that the tool options are set to "normal," "foreground to background," and "linear." On the gradient layer, apply a gradient with yellow (foreground) at the top of the "flame," and the orange (background) at the bottom of the flame, as shown.

If the "fire" layer is still visible, you will have to hide it to see the gradient you've created.

Make the fire layer active; set its layer attribute to "hard light."

Make the original object layer active. Since the two rotates early on moved the fire layer around a bit, you'll need to move the original object layer so that the object is positioned on top of the flames. (If you move the fire layer, you will need to be concerned about moving the gradient as well. You can merge these layers if you want.)

If the original object didn't have some particularly important color, fill it with something that contrasts well with the flame. (Chromed letters work well here, too.)

We now have burning words!

This is one way to do fire. The nice part is that the "hard light" attribute gives a white-hot glow to the center of the fire. The bad part is that you're tied to the background color you used. Revert to your saved image, and lets do a fire that's independent of the background color.

Make the fire layer active. Set your foreground color to yellow (255, 255, 0) and your background color to orange (255, 51, 0). Load the transparency mask for this layer as a selection, then apply the gradient over exactly the same area as in the first method. (Note that you do not need to create any extra layers this time.) Set the layer attribute to hard light.

As before, make your original object visible, and set it into the state that you'd like to burn. Here's an example with burning chrome.

If you've been following the chroming lessons, I've trimmed the excess blur, but omitted the opaque copy of the letters behind the chrome (this doesn't come along until advanced chroming, anyway). The reason the letters look bluish is the interaction between the top layer of lettering, which is white with the exclusion attribute, and the fire showing through the chrome. There is no adjustment layer in this case.

If you want your object to show some effects of burning, you can always blur and ripple it, too. This is a very small blur (1 pixel), a ripple, and another small blur (1.4 pixels). To get a consistent blur on the lettering, I first merged the layers used to make the chrome.

I've reverted back to the undistorted, chromed word here.

I said earlier that this technique was independent of background color. To prove it, here it is with no change from above except changing the color of the background layer. If you want to use a colored background, though, you may find that other layer attributes on the fire layer will work better than "hard light." ("Normal" works well on a bright blue background.)

If you find the flames to be too faint and drab, you can duplicate the fire layer. Duplicating once is OK, but more than once starts to block up the colors too much. I've given the upper layer a hard light attribute, which produces a better result than a simple duplication.

A little smoke completes the image. I duplicated the fire layer once more, then treated it to the basic "fire" creation again: rotate, wind, rotate, ripple, and blur, with a final extra ripple. (You will probably want to hide everything else while doing this.) Set the colors to a dirty brown and white. Select the transparency mask for this layer, and fill with a gradient, brown at the top to white at the bottom. Move this layer below all other fire layers, make all the necessary layers visible again, and reposition this layer against the object. Make sure that its layer attribute is normal.

We're done!