Photoshop® CS4 Bible

22.3. Flaming Type

Fire is one of the trickiest things to create convincingly in Photoshop from scratch, but following these steps should produce some reasonable flaming text. As you'll see, this example is one of the few cases where you'll need to directly manipulate the pixels of a rasterized type layer, which means sacrificing some editability.

1. Create a new document. Out of habit, I set mine at 1024 × 768 pixels, and 72 pixels per inch, which is a handy size for images destined for the Internet. . Fill the background layer with black by pressing Shift+Backspace/Shift+Delete on your keyboard and choosing Black from the Use pop-up menu.

2. Add some text. Select the Type tool from the Toolbox, or press the T key on your keyboard. Select a typeface that you think looks good from the Options Bar (I chose one that was pre-installed on my Mac, called Herculanum), and make sure the type color is set to white. Click on your canvas and enter some text — in this example I used the word "fire."

   Duplicate the type layer by pressing Ctrl+J/+J), and turn off visibility of the duplicate you just made by clicking on the eyeball icon at the left of the layer's thumbnail. By this point, your document should look like the illustration in Figure 22.10.

   Figure 22.10. A simple radial gradient was used to produce the background for the fire effect.

3. Start making some flames. Click on the first of your two ...