Create Fireworks Tutorial

Made by: Nick

In this tutorial I aim to teach you how to create realistic looking fireworks and add them into a picture.

I am going to start with using the photo below, the aim is to make some Fireworks in the night sky.




Lets start by making a new layer for the fireworks.




Select the Elliptical Marquee Tool.




In the new layer, make a circle the size of what you want your firework to be.




Fill it with a black colour.




Now from the filters menu use "Add Noise..." (Filters>Noise>Add Noise...).




Set the Amount to 40, Distribution to Gaussian, and select the Monochromatic option, then press OK.




Now open levels window (Image>Adjustments>Levels).




and set the values as shown below (120 , 0.90 , 200 ) then press OK.




After that apply some Radial Blur (Filters>Blur>Radial Blur...) to the selection.




With these values (Amount 20 , Method Zoom , Quality Best).




Click OK, and you will see something similar to what is below:




To make only the white color appear change the layer mode to linear dodge.




Open the Hue/Saturation window from Image>Adjustments




Change the hue and saturation as you want to get the wanted color but make sure that lightness is set to 0




You could stop here but I am going to continue editing to create an even better firework effect with another colour.

Select the elliptical marquee tool again and set the feather to 25px (this is important).




Now make a small circle inside the firework as shown below:




Now open Hue/Saturation window again, and choose another colour.
 



You should end up with something similar to what is below:




You may want to decrease the opacity of the firework layer to get a more satisfying result.



 

Final Result

After all that you should end up with something similar to what I have below which I think looks pretty realistic. You could repeat this process a few times to create more fireworks if you like.