Making Flames without Colour Balancing entire image

[Gframe]

I'm having some trouble. I've created a custom set of flames by smudging a white line, into several different shapes all resembling flames and I've put them together in a gif image. Everything was going fine, until I started to add more images in between the flames. What's happening, is that the Colour Balance that is affecting the Flames is affecting everything else on the image as well.

How do I specify what the colour balance affects? Bearing in mind, that when I click on the check box that says 'group with previous layer' it just turns my flames white and black.

[Tamlin]

You need to turn your Color Balance layer into a clipping layer. If you look at Step 5 in the tutorial linked below, it explains how to do it (they are using a Hue/Saturation layer, but the principle is the same):
Lunacore Photoshop Training - Explosion Effect tutorial

[Gframe]

That produces the same effect. It's like because the base brush colour is white it has nothing to adjust the colour from, so as soon as I take it away from the black background I lose all opportunities to have colour.

[sami1337]

Originally Posted by Gframe

That produces the same effect. It's like because the base brush colour is white it has nothing to adjust the colour from, so as soon as I take it away from the black background I lose all opportunities to have colour.

You should be able to colourise greys i think. I suppose you could start over without using whites and blacks?

I don't really know what you mean tho..

[Gframe]

Fair enough. I've confused myself as well.

Here's the image in a rough form.


I don't want the girl to be coloured orange, she's supposed to be coloured greyscale essentially. The only way I can get her to be grey is if I put her in front of the first line of fire, which makes it look awkward. However when I clip the initial layer this happens.



I just tried restarting it with black, a beige, a red and a blue, and none of them even came close to resembling fire the way white does. Hopefully that partially helps out wiht your confusion about my confusion...

[sami1337]

Try putting everything in sub folders (sets). So the text and dragons go in one folder, flames in the one below and the girl in the lowest. Then set the layer blending of those folders to normal instead of pass through. It should restrict the effects to only that folder and it's content.

See if that helps.

[Gframe]

No that doesn't work either unfortunately.

Heres what I think the most basic problem is. Because my original flames are white and only white, there are no hightones, or shadows really. So the contrast that emerges is because it's capable of pulling in the black background, which is why when I clip it to a layer all colour balancing goes away because I'm colour balancing white.

[sami1337]

Could you show us your layers window?