Book Cover Tips

19. || fire

This one is a little more experienced, but after awhile you'll get the hang of it. And I bet you're like "why is there a hunger games picture there" and I am here to tell you that that right there is what I used to get the fire effect, since I couldn't find any PNG's I liked. But here's how to do it.

i. Open a black image as the background and then your PNG as the foreground. It has to be black or else this won't work the way it's supposed to, but if you want to experiment around with darker colors, it might work that way as well.

ii. Merge your PNG into the background and then open the above image or another fire picture you'd like to use. 

iii. Select screen or lighten on the transform tab and position where you'd like the first "flame" to be. The background of the fire image should almost look like it's faded in with the cover background, but if it's not, just simply use the gradients until you get it to. 

iv. After doing this, you'll have to mask out the area's you don't want until you get the look you want. The best tip I can give you is to not worry about getting all of the hair this time around; make multiple layers and do it this way. Merge.

v. keep repeating this process until you get the look you want. You'll have to play around with the tabs at the end if you want to touch up a few things, but that's more of the simpler part.

vi. For mine, I opened it in Phonto and chose a brighter filter so it would show up better before I added the title. The font for this cover is times new roman, all lower case.

And that's it. I'd really love to see your guys' edits on this, mostly because if you have any problems with it or anything like that, I want to help, but I also want to see how you all do on it! Like I said, it's more advanced, so don't get frustrated the first try. It'll get easier, I promise.

If you also want to use your own fire image, there are some good PNG's on google and I'm sure there's some on tumblr; or if you're like me, just get another Catching Fire poster and use that, haha!