Posted on February 21st, 2008
Written by John and filed into the Brushes, Basics, Web Graphics, Miscellaneous, Effects category.

Then I do a gradient overlay with these settings:

The colors used in this gradient are: black - #000000 and a yellowish color again - #515001. The same with the colors again, just messed with them until I got an effect.

The effect achieved so far:

The font is a little dark so I will duplicate the layer we have and then go back into the blend options on the new layer and remove all of the options except for the gradient overlay and choose these settings:

The effect now achieved:

After this step we get to use the magical smudge tool, which has a lot of use for me on many different things. So choose the bottom layer first then pick the smudge tool and here are the settings I am using:

Now with the bottom text layer chosen grab on to the top of the fire in different places and make movements with your mouse from left to right to achieve the effect.

Here is the effect I got quickly using that method:

Next choose the top layer and do the same thing…Be careful not to grab too much of the text or it will smudge the text a little too much..

Here is the next effect I got smudging the top layer:

So far the fire looks ok but it doesn’t look as good as I want so I am going to separate the layers so I can edit the bottom text with some image adjustment settings. Before you can edit it with image adjustments you have to make a new layer and draw a black box around the text making sure to cover all the fire then move that layer below the text layer. After doing that click on your text layer and merge it down like so:

Here is an example of what I mean with the black box behind the text. I made this image just as an example with a white background just to be clear on what I mean so don’t use this as a step in the tutorial.

After you do that put the top layer of white text with fire back over the layer like it was before.

Next I am going to use the image>>adjustments>>levels on the top bar in photoshop in the layer you just merged with the black box.

On the first screen in levels use these settings:

Then go to image>>adjustments>>hue/saturation and use these settings:

What is cool about hue and saturation is that you can make whatever color fire you want. Overall I am pretty happy with how the fire turned out but since this is a tutorial I am just showing the basic idea.

Here is my result after all that:

Now to make the fire look way more realistic at least to me, we are going to duplicate
the bottom layer which is the main fire layer.

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