Smoke

[brucet]

I'm looking for some help. I need to create a smoke affect over a picture. It needs to be transparent. Anyone know where I can find a tutorial? I've tried a few approaches but my brain is having fits trying to figure it out. Google has drawn blanks.

Thanks.

[hartpaul]

What colour smoke? You can get a smoke like effect using the inkdropper effect with KPT filters.
Or you can get a mist / smoke like efect by photographing the flow over from dry ice with warm water.

[LeviFiction]

Or if you're talking more about clouds and fog you can create a new layer and use the KPT Noize filter to create some Render Clouds. Then change the blend-mode to Screen or similar. This will make the black disappear leaving only the white area. You can then adjust the opacity and perform other effects to it.

You can also use smoke brushes, many brushes are available PaintShop Pro. Also many more for Photoshop that can either be directly or forcibly converted to PSP brushes.

Or you can use stock photographs that already have the overflow of smoke from dry ice like hartpaul suggested or of smoke from actual fire or *** that you can overlay on the image, and again use the Screen-blend mode to remove the black background (it's almost always black).

[brucet]

Thanks.
The below photo will show you what I'm trying to achieve. (I can find plenty of smoke images on the web so creating the smoke is not an issue. It's the blending that I'm having issues with).
So far I can add the smoke on as a layer above the car layer. Then adjust the opacity. I then set the blend mode to 'Exclusion'. But keep in mind that both the smoke and car image have black backgrounds so it 'works' better. (Actually that's not true as the black background is a separate layer as well. The car being cutout in its own layer). However where the smoke is blended over the car, blue areas, the smoke tends to get very 'dirty' and begins to change colour if I increase the opacity too much. Over 50% and it actually becomes orange/brown in places! Ideally I want to delete the background colour on the smoke but because it is so transparent that's all but impossible to do.

Thanks.