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It has been a long time since we last played with Adobe Photoshop. Last Photoshop tutorial is dated in May 2008… can’t believe it myself. Anyway, today let’s see how we can add realistic steam to a cup of coffee or tea using nothing but Adobe Photoshop. It’s easier than you thought, so let’s get started.

We need a suitable photo to start with, of course. I tried searching my photo archive for a cup of tea or coffee photo, but I couldn’t find any. Looks like I am not a tea or coffee person, but never mind, we just use a french fries photo first. Steam does arise from fries, doesn’t it?

That’s the original image, resized to 460 pixels width. Photo was taken in A&W fast food restaurant in IOI Mall.

You can see the cold fries doesn’t look very appetizing. Adding steam to food can instantly make it look more appetizing. So, by the end of this tutorial, the french fries should appear hot and very appetizing!

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Use the Polygonal Lasso Tool to do a cone shaped selection above your object, just like what you see in the picture above. After that, feather the selection with a value of about 8 (Select > Feather). Adjust this value accordingly, if your picture is larger, then use a larger value.

Create a new layer (Layer > New > Layer). Make sure this is the active layer where you will be working on. Set your foreground and background palette colors to gray and white respectively. After that, cast some clouds on this new layer (Filter > Render > Clouds).

Okay, now you should get some forms of steam, but to make it more realistic we need to blur it a little with the motion blur tool (Filter > Blur > Motion Blur). Set the Angle to -80 and the Distance to 100px (again, adjust these values depending on your photo size).

Steam is of course very mobile and moves around and never rise in a uniform pattern. In order to look more natural and to give the impression of the steam diffusing, we distort it a bit. (Filter > Distort > Wave). Again, play around with the setting values until you achieve a reasonably good effect.

Now, the steam is taking shape nicely, but it’s still a bit harsh. Let’s soften it. In the Layers Palette, change the steam layer’s blending mode to Hard Light and lower the Opacity to about 85%.

To make the steam even more realistic, you could duplicate the steam layer, resize and distort it a bit, and play around with its placement a little to give your food that extra ummmph!

My french fries now look extra fresh and delicious. Let’s serve our hot french fries, shall we?!

Tags: food, photo, photoshop, tutorial