Creating Fireballs and Explosions

Fabio Sasso uses custom brushes and layers to create an explosive scene in Photoshop.

Final Result

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to transform a fairly typical road-trip image – with a big blue sky and wide-open spaces – into an apocalyptic battle scene, complete with tanks, guns, parachutists and a hail of incoming missiles.
Of course, changing the colour of the sky and pasting in tanks and other elements is the easy bit: things get trickier when it comes to creating the smoke and explosions.
Here, Fabio Sasso shows you how to create custom brushes that recreate smoke and fireballs convincingly. You can use a background image of your own, or if you want to use the same image as Fabio, you can buy it from http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=. You’ll also need images of tanks, guns and parachutists

01. In Photoshop, open your landscape image. Search for images of guns and tanks similar to those I’ve used here, and place them onto new layers. Duplicate the tank layer and make the new one smaller, as though they’re in formation. Next, change the saturation of the road image: go to Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation, use -40 for the Saturation. Now go to the gun layer and again select Image > Adjustments > Hue/ Saturation. This time use: Hue 35, Saturation 25, Lightness: 0, and select

Read More.....