Hey everyone, for our first tutorial it will be something rather short, but a nice effect, we will be setting a book on fire in Photoshop CS2, but it can be applied in CS3 and all the other version of photoshop.
Here is the final outcome


It isn’t really complex in my opinion, just a few rendering and stock searching
First I wanted to find the book I would be setting on fire, I fount it at sxc.hu, the exact location is right here
Heres a preview

Now it’s time to get some flame and fire stocks, you can search sxc.hu again if you like or deviantart. If you use deviantart make sure you give credit to the photographer or artist in your work. And only use the resource area stocks, and if they asked to be noted, then note them.
Now it’s time to open photoshop and start cutting your images, for the book I used the pen tool, which was perfect because you can control it with ease by pressing ctrl and alt. And I am sorry but I made this I while ago, so I do not have the psd for the book, if I did I would of uploaded it for you guys. I will upload the outcome psd for you guys though.

For the flame stock, make sure the stock you use, has a flame with a black background, so that you can set it to Linear Dodge. It will make it easier, because you just have to erase the areas that doesn’t look right with a mid opacity soft brush. When your done, place the stock over the book, smudge with a default soft brush, at 50% strength around the stock border. To make the flames real. Make sure the blending is on Linear Dodge

Now duplicate that layer, with ctrl + J to make you flame more brighter, if needed

Now go back to the book layer, and duplicate that layer, and smudge the book with a soft brush, should look like this. I just hid my flame stock layers to show you what I have done

I’ve set the settings to Color Dodge, and put the opacity at 56 percent, which looked like this.

Now I went to the first book layer again, and duplicated it again. This time hide the first book layer, then take out a chalk brush using the smudge tool. Here are the smudge setting I used for the brush.







Just smudge parts of the book next to the flames to make it look like it is fading away, make sure the strength is under 40 percent. Here what I got

Now show the flame layers you hid, and you’re done

Download PSD
Download PSD: Here