Original image

Canon Powershot A570 IS
1/100 Second
F/2,6
6mm focal length
80 ISO
Internal flash on
Focus manually

How it was taken:

The smoke comes from a simple incence stick, can be bought in pretty much any asian store. I don't really have a good black backdrop, and since I only have the internal camera flash I went outside to take the picture. Then I knew I could use the flash without worrying about lighting up the background and I would really get a black bakground, stars and stuff are no worry since I was going to use such a fast shutterspeed. So I was holding the smoking incence stick in one hand, the camera in the other and just photographing as fast as the flash could load up, I had previously set the focus manually at the approximate distance to where the smoke would be.

Things I like about it:

The shapes of the smoke, how they move up and around each other and that you can see things in it, flowers, a face…
I also really like the colours, how it changes from one piece of smoke to the next.

Things I don’t like about it:

It’s not totally in focus, or I used too short a shutterspeed, it’s at least not as sharp as I wish it was.

Postprocessing:

I started out by rotating the image so that the smoke would go straight up, I then cropped it to get the smoke in the middle followed by extending the canvas to the sides so it wouldn’t be too cramped.

I then used Curves (could also have been done the exact same way using Levels) to get the background to a solid black, I chose the black colour sampler and clicked on the lightest part of the lightest branch in the background. This makes all colours as dark and darker than that be pure black.

After doing that I inverted the entire image to get more of an impact, the smoke pops out more at the viewer that way.

This is what the image looked like at this stage

Hey, not bad, but I feel like the midtones need to be a bit darker, so I open up the Level adjustments and slide the middle slider a bit to the right, in this case I put it to 0,83.

Now comes the fun part, getting to add colours. I start out by making the image black and white by making a, funnily enough, Black & White adjustment layer (this is for CS3 only, it could also be done using the channel mixer or hue&saturation). Now then, what colour should I give it? Since there were so many dots of smoke in this and they weren’t really connected to each other but more floating in the air I decided to go with a gradient, so that the different smoke puffs would be different colours but it would still be a gradual transformation. So I chose the gradient-tool and checked to see if there were any built-in gradients that would fit what I wanted, and there was one called Spectrum that looked perfect, it had lots of nice colours and a gradual change. So I selected the gradient tool, chose that it would be a linear gradient and picked the Spectrum colour combination. After that I just created the gradient from that on a new layer above the rest, I had to redraw it a few times before I got it the way I wanted it, then I changed the blending mode on the new layer to Soft light and the colouring was done.
This is what the gradient looks like without changing the blending mode to Soft light

After that I sharpened the picture a bit by duplicating and merging all layers and using the high pass filter on that new layer before setting it to Soft light.

The last thing to do was add a border, I started out trying with a black one but I felt it didn’t add anything to the image, if anything it was just distracting. So I ended up extending the canvas by a number of pixels and adding a drop shadow.