OK here goes, apologies in advance if this gets confusing I ended up with about 8 flattened PSDs and had trouble remembering the exact steps. Also this tutorial does use a couple of filters outside of photoshop which are part of this range, however these filters are expensive so at the bottom of the tutorial I have offered a solution to get the same results in PS. I just find it easier using Nik Software because I am lazy :D1. Find a well defined high resolutions source like this:
2. Desaturate it:
3. You'll need a good lava source for this, there are plenty on Google images and Flickr. Basically you will need to cut out portions of the lava and apply them to the ice cream. I used the transform then warp tool to get them to bend round exactly. I then burned and dodged the lava to match the lighting on the ice cream
4. You should end up with something like this:
5. Next the fun part, although I did use a filter outside of photoshop here, I am sure you could create the effect with gradient maps. Basically I needed a thermal image so I could really make the lava glow through the shadows. In "Nik Software - Color Efex Pro 3.0" there is a filter that does just that called "infrared thermal camera" see below:
Nik software automatically applies this filter to a new layer.6. Next go to Select / Color Range and click on the blue:
7. Having completed the above step it should have selected the blue areas, now hit mask, then invert the mask and set to overlay it should look like this:
8. I then did a few tweaks using the "selective color" tool to make the reds pop more:
9. Now again using a filter outside photoshop which is also part of the Nik Software range we are going to alter the contrast to really make it glow. The filter allows you to alter contrast by color range which is very useful, but again I am sure this can be accomplished in PS just using curves. I also used this filter on this entry to get the glow of the Coke machine.See the settings below and how it really makes part of the the lava glow:
10. Now it looks a bit odd, so going back to the original layer before the infrared filter (this one)
Take this layer duplicate it then move it to the top, then again go to Select / Color Range and click on a medium, almost dark grey area. When it selects these areas hit mask.11. Next I did a level adjustment on the mask so I could control how much of the lava was showing these are the settings I used:
12. Now this is the final result for the lava, it's a bit darker and pops a bit more than the examples above, I was unable to recreate it exactly for the tutorial, but just experiment until you find something that looks good.
13. Now for an easy but extremely effective part. The cone:
14. To make the cone appear like it is glowing, go to channels and look at the blue channel, it's so dark it's almost black (perfect). Copy this channel and paste it as a new layer over the cone and hit mask, then with a soft brush at 75% opacity mask the edges out on both sides. Next add a new layer and set it to overlay. Take the brush tool and an orange / red color and paint the sides. That's it!!
15. Next I added a background, this was just taken from another lava source but had a very high gaussian blur applied to it:
16. Finally the smoke source was actually a fire source, but desaturated and then set to screen as a new layer:
This is the result:
I did manage to almost recreate the "thermal image" using gradient maps. This was just a quick play around and I am sure you could get the exact match quite easily:
As for the glowing lava. Try going to Image / Adjust / Vibrance (think this is only CS5) and up the saturation to 75% that really brings out the reds. If not you can prob also do this in Selective color adjusting the reds a few times.Then duplicate the layer, go to Select / Color Range, select the reds it should literally select just a few dots here and there, then click mask. Apply the mask, apply a gaussian blur then set to screen. Now duplicate this layer,go to blending modes, color overlay and select white, click ok and keeping this set at screen reduce the opacity to 75%, obviously this is an earlier step image so still needs the rest of the steps applying, but the lava does glow and with more tweaking could be a lot better.
Thanks for reading![Edited by User on 6/9/2011 6:08:39 AM, Reason: grammar][Edited by User on 6/9/2011 6:14:12 AM, Reason: I just felt obliged]