Paint.net : Smoke effect

Today, I will show you how to add smoke on top of a chimney thanks to paint.net and few plugins.

First, here is the starting picture :

As you can see, it has a very nice chimney from which we will make smoke emerge.

Here are the steps to add smoke on this picture :

1/ Add a new layer (CTRL + SHIFT + N);

2/ Select the area next to the chimney top with the ellispe selection tool (S key);

3/ Apply a cloud effect (Effects menu > Render > Clouds) with the following values : scale at 110 and roughness at 0.90;

4/ Deselect (CTRL + D);

5/ Apply a motion blur (Effects menu > Blurs > Motion blur) with the following settings : angle at 90° and distance at 80;

6/ Apply a SinWaves effect (Effects menu > Distort > SinWaves) with these params : amplitude at 5 and horizontal period at 15. This effect will create the wave aspect of the smoke.

7/ Apply a gaussian blur (Effects menu > Blurs > Gaussian blur) with a radius of 2;

8/ Apply a glow effect (Effects menu > Photo > Glow) with the following values : radius at 5, brightness at -15 and contrast at 45;

9/ Switch the layer blending mode (F4 key) to screen mode;

10/ You can perform a gradient (S key) on the smoke density (in order to simulate the dissipation) with the following values : transparency mode and linear and then perform the gradient from bottom to top.

Here is the final result of the house with the smoke coming out of it :

To perform this tutorial, you will need the following paint.net plugin :

• le magical plugins megapack.

The nice thing is that you can reuse this technique for other contexts such as a cup of coffee, a cigatte, a fire, etc…

To write this original tutorial, I started from this tutorial photoshop that I have adapted to paint.net with few modifications.

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