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

I installed Ubuntu eee last night on to my little Asus Eee PC 701. It’s a very well put together package and I really like the Netbook Remix interface. I’ve had a few little glitches so far, but over all it’s really impressive.

The background wallpaper takes on a bit more significance than normal with this Netbook Remix interface. With the whole thing semi-transparent, the colours are defined by the background you have. I liked the default red/yellow/green wallpaper but once the interface is over the top of it, the yellow is all but invisible, leaving a murky red and green background.

So I have quickly made up a few alternative coloured versions. The blue one is seen in the screenshot above.

All credit goes to the original artist: Soft. Also more Ubuntu eee wallpapers can be found here.

This turned out to be closer to 10 minutes but I was enjoying it. Made using brushes and coloured using a Gradient Map adjustment layer. Size is 1600x1200px.

And a darker version.

Download the PSD file (4mb)

Download Blue version:
1024x768px
1280x1024px
1600x1200px
1280x800px (widescreen)
1920x1200px (widescreen)

Download Black version:
1024x768px
1280x1024px
1600x1200px
1280x800px (widescreen)
1920x1200px (widescreen)

Download the template

I’ve always loved these simple pattern wallpapers. They’re the only type I can stand for very long, other than a plain, solid colour.

So, I made this little template for you to make your own. Click the icon above to get a ZIP file containing the Photoshop PSD.

The PSD will open very small. This is to keep the file size down. It’s annoying on sites like deviantart when people make a wallpaper, then have it in a thousand variations of colour and every possible resolution in one ZIP file, making the download 50mb or something ridiculous.

So with this template, you can resize the image yourself to what ever size you like. It’s built with adjustment layers, so it won’t pixelate or blur. You can choose your own pattern or change the colour very easily.

The only down-side is that you need Photoshop to be able to do all this… so if you don’t have Photoshop and want it at a different size, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.

Pattern resources

Original pattern from 5qm.de, where you can find more patterns.

The Inspiration Gallery has some great old style patterns.

Deviantart also has a good Photoshop Pattern Resources section where you can download patterns already as Photoshop Pattern files.