How to create this circular smoke effect in Photoshop?

Question

I need an effect like this, I have smoke brushes but I need something in a cricle shape, so that I can wrap it around a human body. Can it be done using Photoshop or Illustrator?

Answer 1

If you have a good smoke brush, paint an approximately horizontal stroke on a transparent background. Place it in the middle of the image. Generate some twists with the smudge tool. Let the left and right ends be narrow. Use eraser and fix with smudge tool.

Apply Filter > Distort > Polar coordinates to get a ring. Apply perspective distortion if needed.

If you use ordinary brushes, you can as well draw a circle and stroke it instead of using Polar Coordinates. You must create the richness by painting, smudging and erasing. You can smooth the traces of manual brushing with Radial spin blur and by doing very careful smudging. Insert possible perspective when the ring is otherwise ready.

Here's one result. No smoke brush is used, only an ordinary one. Radial spin blur before the perspective insertion helped to fade the remnants of manual brush strokes. It got plenty of smudging to make the richness

Answer 2

This can actually be done fairly easily with Photoshop. However, detailing the steps necessary takes more effort than actually creating the artwork (smoke). It took 10 times longer to write this post than it does to simply create the image.

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There is nothing "solid" here.

Every time you do these steps you'll get a different image. You will not get the same image I got. And I couldn't create that same image twice. The entire point of this method is its randomness.

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These are the basic steps to show how you could achieve something similar without any special brush work or painting skills. It's all filter choices and slider adjustments.

These steps are to explore the method and not to provide a final usable image from this post.

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Procedure

• New Document
• Black base layer
• Second transparent layer to paint on
• Paint a straight, white, horizontal, stroke.... nothing special, just a straight line within the canvas area (stay away from the image edges)

• Choose Filter > Distort > Polar Coordinates. Make certain Rectangular to Polar is selected and click OK.

• Use Edit > Free Transform to distort the ring into perspective (Holding down Modifier keys while dragging handles will allow for perspective distortion).

• Add a Layer Mask to the paint layer
• With this Layer Mask highlighted, choose Filter > Render Clouds from the menu
• Still with the mask highlighted, choose Image > Adjustments > Levels to increase contrast of the mask.

You may need to unlink the mask with the layer and then move the mask around a bit to position the "poofs" a little better. When you are happy with positioning Control-Click/Right-click the Mask and choose Apply Layer Mask from the contextual menu.

• Choose Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur from the menu and blur the ring... No special settings, simply blur it quite a bit.

• Choose Filter > Other > Maximum from the menu. Make certain the filer drop down menu is set to Preserve Roundeness and move the slider right to get a more random density shape.

• Choose Filter > Distort > Wave from the menu. The settings you use here are your choice. The only important aspect is that you have it set to Sine for the Type in the upper right corner.

• Choose Edit > Fade Wave from the menu. Set the blend drop down to Screen and lower the opacity until the distorted image fades in well.

• You can repeat the last couple steps... Filter > Wave and adjust settings slightly (or click the "randomize" button) and then Fade the wave, choosing various opacities. The more you do this more the more "random" the smoke may become. It takes some experimentation.

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Repeat any of the above steps to keep refining.

• Add another Layer Mask to the paint layer and choose Filter > Render > Clouds again.. and adjust levels as needed.

• Run the Maximum Filter again