Animated Fire Embers & Sparks

Photoshop Action
by Artorius

Thank you for purchasing this item. Animated Fire Embers & Sparks is a pack containing 30
animated fire ember effects and sparks and a Photoshop action to place them, very easily, over
your images.

The effects are perfectly looping (1 second duration) and come in various forms with different
flowing directions.

In order to use the action, you will have to load the Animated Fire Embers & Sparks Photoshop
Action into Photoshop. Follow this tutorial if you don't know how to install an action.

Setting up the image and running the action:

Open an image into Photoshop. Make sure the image is in RGB mode, 8bits (Go to Image menu
- Mode to check).

While the image can be any size, the effects are 4K (3840x2160px) in size, so depending on your
image, they may look very large or small.

To place an effect just run the action. There are two versions of the action that you can run
from the Actions Panel: Animated Fire Embers & Sparks for CC or for CS5+.
When you run the selected action, it will prompt for a file to open. Go to the Fire Embers &
Sparks folder, select a desired folder (named with a number) and select the first JPG file inside
(name ending in 00000). For example, if you go to folder 21, there will be 30 JPG files named
21_00000 to 21_00029. So 00000 to 00029 is found in all folders. 00000 is the first image of the
sequence of images (frames) which creates the 1 second looping video. Click Open/Place.
Photoshop will actually pick all images starting from the one you specified (ending in 00, then
01, 02 to 29).

A video timeline will be created, containing a smart layer (which contains a video layer). The
effect and timeline have a duration of 1 second. It loops indefinitely and seamlessly. You can
view the timeline from the Window menu - Timeline.

After the action is complete, the smart layer (Animated Fire Embers & Sparks) can be adjusted
as desired: you can scale it, rotate it, distort it, puppet warp, hide parts of it using the built-in
mask.
Multiple effects can be added into one scene by running the action more times.

NOTE: After the action is complete, the animated effect layer is placed in your scene. If your
scene is smaller in size, the animated layer might not be very visible (it goes out of the scene).
You should scale and reposition the layer as you want (Edit Menu - Transform - Scale). You
might want to make it smaller to be visible and then rotate it to place it exactly where you
want.

There are three added filters to the animated layer created by the action: Brightness/contrast,
Hue/Saturation and Levels, all turned off by default. Turn them on and adjust values if you want
to change the intensity of the animated effect.

Also, the action is compatible with Animated Fire Photoshop Action and Animated Energy
Effects Photoshop Action, if you consider to purchase this one as well.

You can either export to animated GIF from File - Export - Legacy Save for Web as GIF with
Looping Forever or you can render as video from the Timeline panel. The video you can use in
your own projects and duplicate in a video editor as many times as you want.

Note: when exporting as GIF, a small image size is recommended, because it can take time to
export and the resulting file can be very large.

If you have more questions, feel free to contact me via my GraphicRiver profile page.