Make a Blue Flaming Ball Effect in Your Photos Using Photoshop

This tutorial will teach you how to create a blue flaming ball effect in your photo’s using a few steps. You will require basic knowledge of photoshop.

This is the final Image:

You can get the PSD at the end of this tutorial.

There are two images used in this tutorial, one is the one displayed in Step 1, the second can be downloaded here.

Step 1:

Right click and save this image, then open it in Photoshop:

Step 2:

Create a New Layer, Spread the color brown [color code:#936952], onto the whole layer using the paint bucket tool. Change the Layer style from Normal to Hue. Bring the Layer’s opacity down to 70%.

Step 3:

Create another layer, this time using the paint bucket tool spread the color blue [color code: #53C3E9] onto this layer. Change the layer style to hue for this layer too, bring the opacity down to 70%.

Step 4:

We start creating the Flaming effect. For this, we open a new document. Say about 400 x 400 px. Using the paint bucket tool, spread the color black to the background. Draw a proper circle with equal sides. You can do this by keeping the shift button down while making the circle.

Step 5:

Once you have made the circle, go to the filters menu, find the stylize filters and look for Wind, click on it. Once you click on it, photoshop will ask if you want to rasterize the circle layer, click yes. Use these settings:

This is what happens after using the filter once:

Step 6:

Use the wind filter again to get bigger streaks, by pressing CTRL+F, thats a shortcut. You’ll get this:

Step 7:

After applying the filter twice, go into your Edit menu, go into the Transform section, from there choose Rotate 90 CW. Now apply the Wind filter again, press CTRL+F, do it twice just like last time.

You need to repeat this till you have applied wind to all sides of the circle:

Step 8:

To create a little zig zag effect, we use the Ripple Effect. You can find this in the filter menu under distort. Use these settings:

You’ll get something like this:

Step 9:

Now to add the colour, just follow these steps carefully:

1. Go to Image > Mode > click Grayscale

When you do this, this message will pop up :

Changing modes will affect layer compositioning. Flatten image before mode change?

Click on Flatten. When you flatten an image you are merging all the layers together, rendering all those layers uneditable.

2. Go to Image > Mode > click Indexed color

3. Go to Image > Mode > click Color Table

Then set the table to ‘Black body’:

Step 10:

Once you have done this, select a square area using the marquee tool and cut and paste the flaming effect surrounding for the flaming ball like this:

To get rid of the black background, change the layer style to Screen:

Step 11:

Once this is done, create a new layer, use the marquee tool to select an area that covers your flaming effect completely, then use the paint bucket tool, to spread blue color [code: #53C3E9] on it:

Change the Layer style on this layer to Hue. You’ll get a color transformation to blue:

Step 12:

Copy and paste the Flaming ball image into this image, it will create its own new layer. Resize it using the transform tool (ctrl+t or Edit -> Free Transform), then align and set it right in between the flaming effect as shown below:

To get rid of the black background change the Layer style to Exclusion. Take the Opacity of this layer down to 30%, you get the final image:

Hope this tutorial on how to Make a Blue Flaming Ball Effect in your photos using Photoshop was easy to understand and you like the result. Leave me questions if there are any. The PSD can be downloaded here.