Smoking Kills

Smoking Kills – An experiment in Photoshop

Smoking Kills is an experiment in photoshop to create an image that portrays how smoking kills many people each year.

Following my personal work experimenting with smoke photography, I came up with the idea of using a skull made from smoke, obviously this would need to be created in Photoshop.  I used some of the images I took during my experiment with smoke photography to create the illusion of the smoke being in the shape of a skull.

Creating the Skull

I had an image of a skull from photographing some medical models, I found a suitable one and used this as the basis of my smoke skull.  I cut the image of the skull from the background, and placed it on a black background.  Followed by using the glowing edges filter in Photoshop, this was then desaturated.  After importing and placing numerous images of smoke in strategic places, the eraser was used to selectively delete certain parts of certain layers.  This gives the impression of the smoke flowing more naturally.

The cigarette in the lower portion of the image is sorry to say one of mine, it was lit and placed in a clamp and photographed against a black background as per normal smoke photography. and placed into the image on its own layer.

After some more finessing and playing with the opacity of the different layers I was happy with the result.

I am now using this image as an aid to help me stop smoking, whenever I feel the urge to light up I look at this image and put that cigarette away.

Anyway the finished image is below, as always if you have any opinions on it, please feel free to leave a comment below.

Gareth Williams LSWPP – Portrait Photography Dundee