GIMP Tutorial: Smoke Effect

[Music] this is Nick slow goes by Nick calm and in today's tutorial I'll be demonstrating how you can create this smoke effect using and at any point in this tutorial you could look down at the bottom left hand side of my screen to see which mouse clicks and keystrokes amusing in order to follow along with this tutorial you'll need a specific smoke brush a set of brushes to install into I'll have a link to that in the description of the video the brushes are actually made for Photoshop but you can install them into the same way you would a brush it should work just the same so the first thing we're going to do in is we're going to set up a new document so we'll go to file and go to new and we want our document to be 1280 by 720 or we could actually make that a little bigger I just made it this size because that's the size of the YouTube thumbnail just make this 1280 by thousand go ahead and click OK and you know what I should I should back up there I missed the step 1280 by a thousand we're going to want to go to Advanced Options and color space RGB fill with the background color and if you see here on my screen I have the foreground set is black and the background set is white so make sure you have those set like that and go ahead and click OK and it should start you out with the white document like that and what we want to do is we want to fill this fill this one with black so we'll just grab the bucket tool make sure you have black selected as the foreground go ahead and fill it in or you could have just started out with the black document either way and what we want to do now is import our picture of this man's face we're going to use this image right here I'll have that linked in the description as well so I'm going to click and drag that into and we're going to want to scale that down so we'll go to the scaling tool and then click on the image hold ctrl on the keyboard and grab one of the corners and scale it down maybe about that much go ahead and click scale and I'll grab the move tool and I'll just put this right about here we want the face to be centered on the vertical axis but on the horizontal axis we don't to be too high up because the smoke is going to be going up above his face like you see here so you want to have this right about there that's pretty good and what we want to do now is convert that to black and white so we'll go to our grayscale actually we'll go to colors and desaturate and you've got these three different options here it'll show you a preview of lightness luminosity average I'm going to go with luminosity go ahead and click OK and what we want to do now is create a new layer actually I just want to move this down a little bit I'm going to grab the move tool I'm just gonna move that down a little bit that's pretty good and now we'll go and create a new layer click the button that says create a new layer and add it to the image yes we want to same sides we want to have the layer fill type set to white and go ahead and click OK and I should put a new white layer above the grass above our work here and what we want to do now is grab the gradient tool and let me expand this a little bit and the gradient we want to choose from this drop down its foreground to background right there I already have it selected and we want to go foreground to background and we want to have a radial shape and like I've mentioned earlier you want the foreground set as black in the background set as white and I'm going to zoom out a little bit by holding ctrl and rolling down on the mouse we want to zoom out a lot and I put the cursor towards the center of the page and just click and drag a line going out about that far to make it like a white to gray gradient I'm actually going to undo that by hitting ctrl Z I'm gonna make that even larger something like that that's pretty good now I'll press 1 on the keyboard to zoom back into a hundred percent maybe zoom out a little bit that's pretty good and what we want to do now is we want to come up here to the opacity of this layer and drop this down just a little bit maybe to like 90 percent where you can kind of see the man's face beneath it because we're going to need to be able to see where his face is for the reference so let me zoom it a little more you can kind of see his face under there so what we're going to do now is we'll go to the brush tool we close this menu back shrink that back down or we go to the brush tool and we're going to find our smoke brushes that we've installed and I'm going to go with this brush right here this top one let me expand this a little bit you'll see it's brush number two and I'm gonna make this brush a little bigger maybe like a five hundred you want to position the brush so that it's like right about it's on the right edge of his face and the bottom of the brush is going towards like underneath his chin like that like like position there before we do that we're going to click on this layer right click on it and go to add layer mask you want to use white fill opacity go ahead and click add and now we can go ahead and just click once to create that a bit smoke effect there and what we want to do now is grab another brush come over here to this side go like that let me undo that you could hit controls need to undo it and just go back and try again if you don't like how it comes out let me try that again I'll put this one like up here maybe okay that's pretty good and what I'll do now is I'll grab this brush over here whatever one that is what's the name of that brush number four and I'll put this one up here like this click again let me zoom in a little bit what we could do now is we could bring the opacity of this layer all the way up so we no longer see whoops so we no longer see the man beneath that just what's showing through the smoke and you see we have a pretty good starting point right here so what we could do now is we can go up and grab this really soft brush I'm going to shrink that down but you want to fill in the prominent areas you want to show like the eyeball is filling the eyeball color that in with black may be a part of the nose maybe bring this down a little more fill in some of the mouth like that you just want to be able to see like some of the face coming through in the smoke like I haven't a thumbnail here he gets some of the face is showing through it's not going to be exactly like mine as you can see here is coming out different these two times I'm doing it so I get some of the face coming through and we want to do now is there's too much like solid imagery coming through on this part so you want to have some more like smoke effect going through there as well so I want to come back down here the smoke brushes I'll grab maybe this one over here which that one is brush number 22 and I'm going to flip this around to make the foreground color white and I'll make this brush bigger and I'll bring this over here and just color that in with white to fill it back in like that and I don't like how that looks I'm sure that control-z that try it again and I don't like how that looks all right that's pretty good right there and from here you can kind of just play around with different brushes to see what you can do to get it to look right let me like I'll show you here I'll bring this down a little bit I'll try this one up here that looks pretty good on one thing I've noticed is that this part of the smoke right here you see like we're like the hair strand the strands of hair are it's a little too like looking too sharp it doesn't look very convincing we want to soften that up a little bit to do that I'll just click on the layer with the elbow or the image of the man is and I'll go to the smudge tool and let me grab a different brush I'll grab like this softer brush over here bring the size down and just maybe click slightly on that it's just smudged a little bit so you don't see so much of that those hair strands showing through like that very lightly get that out of there like that and move that one out a little bit and I'm going to play around this a little more I'll grab another smoke brush I want to add some more smoke to this side maybe I'll try this brush down here we'll go back to 22 raise the size of it oops clicking on the wrong layer we have to click back on the layer mask layer and put that in there now gotta grab the brush again and it looks pretty good now maybe I'll do that I'll try this right here now that and I'd say that looks pretty good so that's just to give you an idea that's how you can go about creating this smoke effect using I actually think it looks better without that but whatever you could play around it and get it to however you like if you have any questions let me know and as always thank you for watching you know what there's one more thing I wanted to show you how to do and this occurred to me that this tutorial would be pretty much useless if I didn't show you how to do this and that's how to take the final image and make it have a transparent background so that you can move it around and place it on different backgrounds like you see I've done here and you can export it as a PNG or a photo a PSD file or a game file whatever you'd like to do with this so let me go back to here what we want to do now is a the layer the top layer we'll right-click on that and go to apply layer mask which is right there and then we'll click on this um this middle layer right here and we'll right-click that and go to merge down wherever that is there it is merge down and then what we want to do is go back to this top layer and right click that and go to alpha to selection and then we want to delete that layer just press the delete button and then we'll just press Delete on the keyboard and then we'll go to select none and you now have the smoke image on a transparent background in case you'd like to place this on to another graphic if you're designing a flier or something like that so that's how that can be done and that should be the end of the video now so again thank you for watching [Music] Oh

Channel: Logos By Nick

Views: 685,126

Rating: 4.9375954 out of 5

Keywords: graphic design, learn graphic design, graphic design for beginners, gimp, tutorial

Id: KvGTWmkGx7Q

Length: 11min 18sec (678 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 03 2017