In this tutorial you will learn how to create a very convincing fire explosion using simple brushes which you can afterwards apply over photographs to get a cool explosion effect. The very strong point of this method is that it takes very little time and you need very basic tools that all photoshop editions offer.

Create a canvas with a black background and pick a soft edge brush with white as the foreground color and create a new layer.

On the new layer start painting random swirls, dont try to give it a particular shape, the more random it looks the better the final result!

If you want to get more variations on the shapes of your doodles just lower the opacity of your brush by 20-30% .

Next reach for your smudge tool and start dragging lines out from the core of the drawing you just created. Make sure that all the lines you paint begin from the centre as this will give your explosion a more radiating effect. Keep dragging lines with the smudge tool until you have created a halo around your initial drawing.

To prepare for the next step we will lock the Transparency of this layer. This will prevent color from spilling over the edges of the lines. Do this by clicking on the Lock button above the layers palette as shown below.

Next from the color palette set the foreground and background colors of the layer to red and yellow. You do not need to worry about the shade of the colors now as we will apply layers, just go for the basic shades.

The go to Filters->Render and click on the Clouds filter, this is what you should be looking at by now , well more or less...

Next change the colors of the layer to the default black and white and apply the Clouds Filter again, thats FIlters->Render->Clouds FIlter, this will eliminate all color from the image. Now go to Edit->Fade or simply hit Ctrl-Shift+F on your keyboard, that Ctrl-Command+F for Mac.This will bring forward the Fade dialogue, we will change the way the filter is applied from Normal to Linear Light.

Hit OK and this is the end result.

Now it may not say much on its own, but if you apply it on top of an image then the result is really impressive. And that is the coolest feature of this explosion effect that it is easy to create and as easy to customize it so it can be applied on almost all photos. So time for some creative chaos!

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