Calling All Pyros: How To Set The World On Fire (Using Photoshop, Of Course)

A recent assignment called for an illustration about the lack of governance in today’s world: politicians going round endlessly in circles, never taking any decisive action to solve problems. My idea: pols pacing around the Earth on a Saturn-like ring, while the planet goes up in flames. Here’s the final:

Here’s a close-up showing more detail:

The illustration combines both hand-drawn and photo elements. I thought it might be helpful to show how I imported the flames into the illo. Here’s the relevant portion before things got hot:

I found a photo of a campfire at night (left, below). I opened the image in Photoshop, accessed the Channels palette, and Command-clicked (I’m on a Mac) on the Red channel. Doing so selects pixels based on their “brightness” values. Black pixels will be ignored. In effect, we are selecting the lightest part of the image contained in the Red channel.

You will see the familiar Photoshop “marching ants” around the selection, but only pixels which are 100% selected will appear in that area. Pixels which are only partially selected remain invisible, outside  the area defined by the “marching ants.”

Confusing, right?

Looked at another way: if you copy the selection and paste it onto a white background, this is what you’ll see (on right, below). The darkish film on the outer edges of the flames represents the pixels which were only partially selected– they are now visible against the white background.

What’s important to remember here: if you use this selection method to extract flames, these muddy, partially selected pixels will be included when you paste your selection into another image– and you’ll need to mask them out.

(For a better understanding of this method– and some additional tricks as well– take a look at Steve Patterson’s tutorial on Creating Luminosity-Based Selections.)

Here’s the extracted flames pasted into my illustration, and scaled down to fit. The muddy, partially selected pixels are clearly visible.

I used both the Warp tool and the Liquify filter to align the flames along the curve of
the earth. Then I added a Layer Mask to the new Flames layer, and used a soft brush set at low-opacity to paint with Black and carefully mask out the unwanted muddy pixels. 

I found a second campfire image, and repeated the above steps, adding flames to the right-hand side of the earth, then warping them into position, and masking out unwanted pixels.

I thought it would look more realistic to have the fire blackening the earth’s land masses. How was this done? Scroll down.

As you can see in the Layers window on the right, I created a new layer called “blacken earth.” I selected the land masses, then painted over them on the new layer with a soft brush set at low opacity and Mode = Color Burn (that particular mode is one which will darken pixels on the underlying layer).

I then duplicated the “blacken earth” layer several times, experimenting with different layer modes (Multiply, Overlay, Soft Light) and opacity settings until I had a blackened effect that looked right.

Also visible at the top of the Layers window and circled in blue: the masks on the two Flames layers that allowed me to paint over (mask out) the muddy, partially selected flame pixels.

And FWIW: if you look at the Globe layer thumbnail at the bottom of the Layers window, you might be able to see (dimly) that the original globe had green land masses and bright blue water. I used a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer to change those colors to tan land masses and muted blue water to better fit the illo’s overall color scheme.

Finally, if you compare the preceding images to the final, you’ll notice that I adjusted the colors of the flames, making them considerably more muted. I think most people would prefer the brighter flames– and so do I. So why did I change them?

Because the illustration will appear in print, it uses the traditional 4-color CMYK color space, rather than the brighter (much wider color spectrum) RGB color space which is used for web images. I imported the flames from an RGB web-based image.

Looking at them here on the web, the flames appear to display a “true yellow.” However, most RGB yellows contain traces of blue (cyan). The blue is not visible when seen in an RGB environment (the web), but in print, that trace of blue will give the yellow a greenish cast.

To prevent that, I used a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer to reduce the saturation of the flames, eliminating the trace of cyan that gives the flames that extra vibrancy. The result is not as attractive, but it heads off any “green cast” problem when the illo appears in print.

What about the yellow “Saturn ring” that the people are walking on? That’s yellow– don’t I have to worry about that as well? No, because I created the ring myself, and I was careful to choose a yellow with no trace of blue (cyan = 0%).

Here’s the final again:

What do you think? Is it an effective illustration? Know a better way to extract fire in Photoshop?  Hope you’ll leave a comment.

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