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Flame effect tutorials abound on the internet, but most of them are quite fiddly, complex, take forever, and/or are ideally optimized for text.  You can, however, break the mould with this simple tutorial that takes under 10 minutes to complete and can be applied to anything.  And hey... the results look pretty darned realistic too!  ;)
 

Step 1: Open up a stock image in Photoshop of any size and/or format.  In this example I have chosen a scene from the rather addictive physics-based mini-game, Truck Dismount.

Step 2: Create a new layer on top of your background stock layer, make it active in the layers palette, rename it 'flames' and, using a soft appropriately-sized tip on the Brush Tool, paint a solid white color over the general area that you want to be on fire. You don't need to spend too long at this stage, as you will be altering this layer greatly in the next step.

Step 3:  Now to add some shape to our fire! Using your favourite smudge tool (mine is Oil Medium wet flow, as found near the bottom of the smudge brush tip list) smudge your fire up and give it a little squiggle as you go. Do this until you get the proper shape. Also, ensure that the smudge strength is set to 75%.  Take your time at this stage and you should eventually end up with something that resembles my image on the left.

Step 4: Time to add a little color! Select Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Color Balance from the main menu and duplicate these settings in the dialog box:

Press OK, and this window should pop up:

Select the Highlights radio button (its towards the bottom of the window, in the Tone Balance section) and, whilst it is selected, push the Red slider to it's highest setting, adding a little Yellow for better color balance.  Repeat this procedure, but the Shadows radio button highlighted instead, and dragging the Yellow all the way to the left. With the midtones, just drag the Red all the way to the right and leave the Yellow alone. You should now have an image resembling my example on the left.

Step 5: We don't, of course, want the whole picture to be red, so we can fix this by holding down CTRL on the keyboard and left-clicking the little thumbnail to the left of the flames layer with the mouse.  This will select everything in the layer.  After doing this, just reverse the selection with Select > Inverse from the main menu, select the adjustment layer in the layers palette, and Edit > Fill your selection with a solid black color. Lose your selection and Viola -  You now have some awesome and easily created fire! This tutorial was written by Andantonius, if you have any questions or comments feel free to contact him via the BioRUST forums, where you can e-mail or send him a private message. Have fun setting things on fire!

- Tutorial written by Andantonius

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