Real Flames

I like this one, and it's fairly simple to do.
You will have to do a Google Image search for fire pictures. The best ones to look for should show most of the fire from top to bottom and have alot of licks and detail to them. It’s preferable to find pics with a dark background, if not black.

These are the pics I chose for this project.
You can click on the flame images to get the fullsize ones I used:

Step 1: Use the Magic Wand on the first fire picture, set at about 20-30 Tolerance. While holding down the shift key, click on all of the dark areas. Make sure not to get the flame licks, only the background areas. Once you have all the background area selected, go to Select > Inverse. Now Copy this.

Step 2: Open the image of the car you want to chop. Paste your new flame layer over your car. Hit Cntrl + T, or Edit > Transform. Shrink the fire image down and rotate it to fit down the side of the vehicle. You may have to use the Distort function to get it to look the way you want.

Step 3: Lower the Opacity of the fire layer low enough to see the whole car behind it. Take the Polygonal Lasso Tool to outline the vehicle body where the flame will overlay. Make sure to subtract any door handles, vents, windows, blinkers, and in this case, hood latches.

Step 4: Go Select > Inverse (Ctrl+Shift+I), then hit the Delete key. Bring the opacity back up to about 50%. You should still be able to see the details of the car behind the fire. Now choose Image > Adjustments > Brightness & Contrast. Raise the brightness up some, but no too much that it starts turning too white. Raise the contrast up very slight just to define more of the detail.

Step 5: Now for the hood. Open the 2nd fire picture selected for your chop. I try to look for something wide with a lot of flame licks and details. Use the Magic Wand again to select all the background areas. Once you have it all, select Select > Inverse, then Copy the selected flames.


Step 6: Go back to your chop window and Paste this fire layer. Hit Ctrl + T (transform) and shrink the image down small enough to work with. Now choose Edit > Transform > Distort and use the selection corners to match the image to the perspective of the hood.

Step 7: Drop the Opacity of this layer down far enough to see the car underneath. Select your Polygonal Lasso tool and outline the entire front painted area of the car, deleting anything that shouldn't be painted (headlights, grill, blinkers). Go Select > Inverse and Delete the excess fire.

Step 8: Bring the Opacity back up to about 50%, and bring the Brightness & Contrast up like the first layer. Keep an eye on your 2 layers and make sure they look somewhat similar.

Step 9: Where the 2 layers come together, you can Erase some of each layer, or what I like to do is use the smudge tool to push back the layer to blend with the other.


- You can add additional fire layers to get more details, but too many can sometimes be overwhelming and actually take away from the overall quality.