Smoke effect needed

[Ken Jarstad]

Total newb alert!

My general rule is to use the simplest tool to do the job. And so far Photoshop Elements is way too complicated for most of what I do. But now I have need of a smoke effect that no simpler tool provides. So I will trot out PhEl v4 in hopes that someone can help.

I have a "photo" of a person, carefully disguised by applying texture effects and I want to apply an additional effect of white smoke, swirling about. The photo is placed inside a rectangle, as though the person were standing in a room - so there is a background area not covered by the photo. To a sequence of three illustrations I want to add progressively more swirreling white smoke inside the rectangle and covering the photo (as though a person in the room were being gradually covered by white smoke).

This is a great challenge to me. I'll bet some of you think this is childs play - or at least I can hope.

[Rockdoc]

Ken,
I don't know how much you are willing to invest for this effect (and I don't know how to do it in PE, though if I had time I think it's an interesting challenge). Here is a link to Smoke Revealers by Digital Juice:

http://www.digitaljuice.com/products/products.asp?pid=311

This is one of their new products, so it is on sale for $19.99. If you are not familiar with their products, they have free software to change all sorts of parameters (color, format, size, etc.), or you can just copy the effect you want (usually in .mov format) to your hard drive and manipulate in PE. They are very easy to use, have alpha channels for transparency, etc.

Jennifer

[Doreen L.]

Jennifer - I was thinking the same thing as you as I read Ken's post.

I really like some of their products - well the $9.99 specials are all I've bought.

[Rockdoc]

Yeah, I usually buy off the clearance section as well - in fact I own quite a bit now, and almost all of them were clearance deals. I really dug the new revealers though (fire, smoke, and fireworks). They give some punch and don't take away too much attention when used judiciously.

[Ken Jarstad]

Hey that Revealers effects package is really nice. I appreciate your pointer.

I looked to make sure I had posted in the Photoshop Elements section since I want to enhance a picture to be used in a Power Point slide. PhEl has some amazing filters and I wish I knew how to use them. My favorite graphics generator app is Kid Pix!

Can PhEl be used to make textures?

[RJ Johnston]

There was an Photoshop tutorial on "smoke." I think I saw it a million years ago. They used the liquify filter. Is there a liquify filter in PhEl4?

Here are some links I got by doing a search for: Photoshop Tutorial Smoke

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/exchange/i ... id=1045146
http://blogs.adobe.com/genesisproject/tutorials/
http://www.adobe.com/uk/designcenter/ph ... smoke.html
http://www.adobe.com/uk/designcenter/ph ... yfire.html
http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/photo ... 8smoke.pdf
http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/photo ... smoke.html

[momoffduty]

Thanks for all of the links. The digital juice packages look good too.

[Rockdoc]

Sorry Ken, I didn't even notice that this post was in the Photoshop Elements forum. On the upside, you can export the Revealers as frames in the Digital Juice software. Pick the frames you like, export as a format that preserves transparency, and add it to your picture as a layer...

I'm going to go check out Kid Pix now...

[Ken Jarstad]

Thanks for the links, Robert. It hadn't occurred to me that I could Google for tutorials - dunno why

The first link has an excellent video but I can't make v4 look like the example. Doesn't say what version they were using either. I printed out one of the step-by-step tutorials and will labor on with that.