Adding some smoke to those stacks in Photoshop

Once in awhile you want to add something extra to a shot of your layout. Well below I show how to add smoke to the stack of your model train engine.

You could do this with just about any item you want to add to the photo. Below are my step by step screen shots.

Below is the header image from my front page of this site. This is the finished image.

Below is the original photo in Photoshop without the added smoke

Next  I open a photo I took at Mt. Washington Cog RR and select the smoke from the real stack

and copy it ( Ctrl + C )

Next I paste my copied smoke into the original layout photo ( Ctrl + V )

Also note as you paste into your original photo that your smoke is now on it's own layer.

This will let you do the next step without effecting your original image, plus you can move around

your pasted image anywhere over your original.

Now I use my eraser tool in Photoshop . It is the one below the rubber stamp tool ( 6th one down on the left )

Use a larger diameter eraser  so when erasing around the smoke it feathers the edge.

 If you use a smaller one it will look like you cut it out with scissors.

Once you have erased around your smoke you can save your new image named something else.

Now that you are done, but you can now also save your smoke for use in other photos as long as you save it

in Photoshop as a transparent layer . Below I deleted my background layer,

 which was my original photo and save the remaining smoke layer in a PSD format ( Photoshop format )

Or you can just copy from your smoke layer and paste into a new Photoshop document that has a transparent layer and save.

I hope you enjoyed this small tutorial on how to enhance some of your train images.