Occasionally for a print or website, you might require images with a white background. Usually these are easy to find, take or mask yourself, but for some things it can be more difficult.

Fire is one example. It would be very difficult to try and mask out flames from a fire photo using the pen tool or a brush, because of the organic shapes and indistinct edges.

As you will see in moment, it doesn’t have to be difficult. Using blend modes and layers, it’s very easy! So easy that I’ve turned it into an action which you can download at the end of the article if you so desire.

One

Take or find a photo of some fire (other images with a similar black background might work too – let me know in the comments if you’ve found something else on which this technique works!)

I started out with a rather nice Creative Commons licensed photo found here on Flickr.

Two

In Photoshop, you should have the default “background” layer. Duplicate it and call it something like “inverted”. Then, do just that – invert the image (CTRL + I)

Now set this “inverted” layer to the “Luminosity” blend mode.

As you can see, the whites of the fire have been dulled and it doesn’t really look very fiery. We’ll fix that in the next and final step.

Three

Duplicate the “background” layer again and drag it above the “inverted” layer. Rename it something like “Lighten”.

Finally, set this layer to the “lighten” blend mode and that’s it. You should have a nice white background on your fire photo.

Download the action

Click the icon to download the action. If you want to know what the action does, then read on.

How it works

Start off with the basic image

Add a Gradient Map adjustment layer

Choose the “Copper” gradient, which should be in the default set

Make sure you tick “Reverse” and “Dither”

Set the adjustment layer blend mode to “Soft Light”

That’s it! It results in a nice, slightly vintage look, which is subtle enough to not need any further adjusting, most of the time. Obviously it’s not suitable for every photo – it warms the colours, so if the photo is already quite warm (for example, an indoors photo, with no flash), then it will likely ruin the picture.

I have the action set to one of the function keys (F6), so I can quickly press that to see how the photo looks with the slight vintage colours.

Before looking at some more before and after shots, I suggest experimenting with Gradient Maps yourself. Load some of the other gradients that come with Photoshop and scroll through them with the arrow keys. The image should update in real-time so you can see how the different gradients look on the photo.

More examples

Video

High resolution version