Ron's Smoke Brush question

crifmer_a3ace2ba16

HI guys,

My Photoshop inexperience is rearing its ugly head here.

I've purchased Ron's Smoke Brushes, and I'm trying to do his Smoke to Fire tutorial, which is basically add a hue/saturation layer, with a certain color, duplicate it, and then set them both to overlay.

Here's my issue: I can't set the layers to overlay. All the contrast blending options (Overlay, Soft Light, Hard Light, etc) are greyed out and I have no idea why.

Also, it doesn't seem to matter what I set the hue/contrast settings to, it always comes up red.

I tried looking for an answer first, but I only found multiple explanations of what the blending modes do, not why some would be greyed out.

I'm using CS6 - haven't upgraded to CC yet.

Thanks for any and all help.

-C

Richard Haseltine

Which tutorial is this?

crifmer_a3ace2ba16

It's just a .jpg, really, that comes with the brush set telling you how to turn the smoke brushes into fire. I don't know if it would be cool posting it here, but here are the steps, verbatim:

1. Smoke Brush
2. add hue saturation adjustment layer check colorize, then dublicate [sic] it.
3. change blend mode to Overlay x2! done

As you can see, it's not very complicated. My problem is I can't change any of my layers to overlay and I don't know why. I have been able to in the past, back when I was messing around with blend modes to see what they did... I just don't know under what circumstances I can use the overlay blend mode and why I can't do it in this instance.

MarkIsSleepy

Can you post a screenshot of just the layers list?

If your bottom layer is called Background and that is the one selected, or if your selected layer is either not visible or is locked then it will not let you change the blend style. If you post a screenshot we can tell if any of those is the issue.

crifmer_a3ace2ba16

But that's the thing. I *can* change the blending option, just not to Overlay:

MarkIsSleepy

Can you check the mode? Go to Image>Mode and see what is selected? I think you are in 32 bit mode from your screenshot and some layer functions don't work with that setting.

If it is 32 bit, try changing it to 16 bit or 8 bit and see if the options un-grey.

crifmer_a3ace2ba16

Nice. That was the problem, thank you.

Except, now it's not working at all. I follow the instructions and it's not doing anything. Not really expecting anyone to help me with this one since I think the answer might be quite involved, but you answered my initial question... now I know that size matters. ;)

Luckily, I don't need to do the smoke/fire thing anytime in the near future, but I'd like to figure this out for the distant future. Time to go to Lynda and start watching some Photoshop lessons.

Thank you again for the help.

Novica

3dbuzz.com has 24 free photoshop tutorials and it might be answered there. Zac is an awesome instructor.
http://www.3dbuzz.com/training/view/photoshop-cs5-fundamentals/photoshop-cs5-fundamentals

MarkIsSleepy

crifmer said:

Nice. That was the problem, thank you.

Except, now it's not working at all. I follow the instructions and it's not doing anything. Not really expecting anyone to help me with this one since I think the answer might be quite involved, but you answered my initial question... now I know that size matters. ;)

Luckily, I don't need to do the smoke/fire thing anytime in the near future, but I'd like to figure this out for the distant future. Time to go to Lynda and start watching some Photoshop lessons.

Thank you again for the help.

Awesome - I'm glad that worked.

Now I'm curious what was supposed to happen though. :)

I followed the steps you posted above and got... a result. It's cool, but I'm not sure if it's what you were going for. The only changes I made were that my brush was red when I added the smoke. I also added a color overlay to the smoke layer - changing he color in that layer style created a bunch of interesting effects.

Mark