Smoking permitted! Creating smoke with Photoshop

Sometimes it's a bit of smoke that's lacking in an image. A bit of smoke to give it just the right atmosphere. In Photoshop it's real easy to create smoke. 

Let me start with using clouds which can be found in the Filter menu. I start with this picture and I'm adding a new empty layer.

Then go to Filter > Render > Clouds (NB: make sure your foreground and backcolor is B&W)

The screen now looks like this: 

I know, this is not the effect I'm after, so I'm gonna use just a little bit of these clouds. Grab the marquee tool, select a small area and copy it is as a layer: 

So now we end up with 3 layers. Disable the clouds layer. Select the top layer (the selection of the clouds) and hit Cmd T (Free Transform). Drag the corners, holding your Shift and Option key, so the entire screen is covered.

Now change the blending mode of the layer to Overlay or Soft light. I went with soft light to get my desired effect:

If however you desire more smoke, you can easily copy the layer and move it. Then you'll get someting like this

It's easy to remove smoke from parts of the picture where you don't like it, using layers masks:

Instead of using more layer masks for each Smoke layer, you can group the smoke layers and use a layers mask on the entire group:

Last thing for this blog is that there is another way to get a nice smoke effect. 

Instead of changing the blending mode of the smoke layer to Soft light, you can use Normal and reduce the Opacitiy of the layer. Then mask out parts where you don't want to have smoke: 

Get to it, experiment and find out what works best for you. 

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