[center]Animated and Glowing Fire[/center]
[CENTER]Tutorial Created By d0nk3y[/CENTER]
[center]Part 1. Making the Fire[/center]

[CENTER]Posted On iPhotoshop[/CENTER]

Before starting to follow the tutorial, finish your piece up to the point where you want to add a fire. Try for something original. Here's what I will be starting with:
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Make a new layer, and go to Image > Apply Image, and click okay. This is to make the signature easier to work with. Sadly, in this tutorial, we will not really be creating the fire by ourselves. Find a nice picture of a fire, with a black or transparent background. Resize it, and place it where you want it to be in the piece. You can keep the background on, like so:
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Now, to get the black to go away, without taking any of the fire, you need to change the blending mode to "Lighten". (Layer > Layer Style > Blending Options, Lighten). You should have something kind of like this:
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Right click your fire layer, and click 'Duplicate Layer'. Continue duplicating, until you have at least 8 fire layers. They should all still be on "Lighten". Now grab the 'Smudge Tool' (). Right click the fire, and select the '17px Soft Round Brush'
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This is the hard part. Hide all of your layers except the bottom fire layer. Now un-hide your second fire layer, and smudge it so it looks believable (use the first to compare) but different. Do this for all of the fire layers. It's important to raise the height of the flame, but I wouldn't change the direction, or "flow" too much, or it's really easy to find a pattern. Here is my second fire layer:
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[center]Part 2. Making the Glow[/center]

Here's the fun part. When you've got all of your fire layers made, grab your brush tool, 'B', and right click. Select a 21 px. Soft Round Brush, and a light orange, probably from the middle of your fire. Make a new layer above your background, and brush like I did, highlighting the parts that would glow in "real life".
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Change the Blending Options to "Soft Light", and use somewhere between 30-60% opacity, and it should look pretty real. Now repeat the brushing step again, with a slightly darker color, on a new layer. Change the blending, and opacity, too. Finally, make one last new layer, and repeat it once more, with an even darker or lighter color, like this:
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Make any finishing touches now, because we're going to Image Ready soon. Add a font, 1px black border, or anything else...

Click your Edit in Image Ready button (Ctrl + Shift + M), and wait for it to load. Now close all Windows except Layers and Animation. Turn on the visibility until you have the first frame like you want it. Create new frames for each fire layer, or more if you want to reuse some. Just turn on one fire layer for each frame, and change the glow layer(s) depending on the height of the flame. If there's more height, use a brighter color glow, or 2 or 3 layers of glow at once. Just play around until it looks nice. If you need more help with the animation click here.. Last, select all the frames, and change the timing to something that looks good. Try around .013 seconds...
Here is my final result:
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And that concludes this tutorial! I hope this helped you, or at least gave you some inspiration/ideas! Please check out our massive render gallery, register, or check out our other tutorials

[CENTER]Tutorial Copyright © To d0nk3y of iPhotoshop. For further questions. Send an email to him.[/CENTER]

Any problem message to my friend donkey@iphotoshop.org