Create a Realistic Smoke Effect

This tutorial will teach you how to create a rather realistic-looking smoke effect using Photoshop.

Start with a blank canvas. For the purpose of this tutorial, I will use a canvas that is 800 by 600 pixels. You can fill it with any color, or just leave it blank. I will fill my canvas with a white background.

Select the polygonal lasso tool, as indicated in the screenshot below. You may need to click and hold your mouse over one of the other two lasso tools in order to display the menu to select the polygonal lasso tool.

Use the polygonal lasso tool to create an abstract polygonal selection on your canvas. For example, mine looks like this:

Without deselecting your selection, create a new layer by clicking the “new layer” icon at the bottom of the layers palette.

Choose a different color than the background. This should be the color that you would like your smoke to be. With your selection still selected, go to Edit>>Fill, make sure “use foreground color” is selected, and press “okay”. This will fill your selection on the new layer with your chosen color. After filling the selection, press CTRL+D (or CMD+D on a Mac) to deselect your selection. For this example, I have filled my shape with black. You may want to move your image away from the edges of the canvas, as I have done here.

Now comes the fun part. With the layer with your filled shape still selected in the layers palette, go to Filter>>Distort>>Wave, match my settings, and press “okay”.

Immediately after applying this “Wave” distortion filter, go to Edit>>Fade Wave and enter 50% for the opacity when prompted. Press “okay”. If you do anything between applying the filter and fading the wave, the “Fade Wave” option will not be present. Be careful! My example now looks like this:

Repeat this “Wave” and “Fade Wave” process until you are happy with your image. You may want to rotate the shape throughout the process to vary the effect. Once you like the smoke you have created, crop your image, save it, and you are done! Here is mine:

Good luck, and please feel free to contact me with any questions regarding this tutorial.