Hair on fire — Quick Photoshop Image Edition!

My best friend always PMs me pictures he thinks are cool. My inbox is filled with random pictures, lol, but I enjoy many of them. A couple hours ago, he sent me the following picture:

The picture seems to have been taken by a DeviantArt user called snowfall-lullaby. She also has an Instagram profile.

When I saw this picture, I thought that it looked a lot like fire, that it was probably intentional. However, I noticed that the colour set-up is more brown than yellow-red and that the hair is darker than the rest of the landscape. I decided then that I had to light her hair on fire on Photoshop!

And so I copied and pasted it into my favourite editor and applied a curve layer:

When I started drawing a year ago (I don't draw much anymore, sadly), I dedicated a couple weeks to studying fire. It was then that I noticed a simple pattern: darker parts are reddish (not completely saturated) and lighter parts are yellow. I also noticed that toward the borders (top, right and left), fire tends to become darker again, becoming orange. I reinforced these rules with a colour balance layer:

Then, I decided that I had enough of an ambience for the fire. It's not like I was creating a professional work. I just wanted her hair to look like fire. Thus, I decided to add an overlay layer to reinforce the lights and the saturation. As I had adjusted the colours and levels with the curves and colour balance layers, the overlay saturated the reds and yellows and created a strong emphasis in the variations in the lighting. In the end, I had to create two or three overlay layers because I wanted to add emphasis on the previous overlays.

Here is what the first overlay layer looks like in raw:

It created a big change and brought the colours toward a nice likeness to fire, but it was barely enough with that. Here is what it looked like right after the first overlay only:

I noticed that it still didn't look like fire! I mean, it kinda did, but fire does not have shadows in itself, since it emits light. Fire is much lighter. Also, the tips of the tongues of fire almost always point upwards, and here, there some tips that pointed downwards. Tongues of fire also have a yellow outlining. They're more orange in the middle and near the upper end. Overall, I had to draw some specific colour/light-shapes. I added another overlay, then a soft-light, then a multiply layer. The resulting layer looks like this:

And here's what the picture looks like in the end:

You will notice that I didn't only modify the hair but the area around it. I added an emphasis overlay around the hair so that there would be an illusion of an orange fog around it. If you look at a campfire in detail, you will notice that the fire lights up the smoke around it like a red aura.

There are some things I didn't do because they would have taken up a lot of effort. One of them is editing the plants around her, especially those to the right, so that the upper-left side was better illuminated. Fire is a light source and therefore its surroundings should be brighter toward the fire, but that's a lot of detail and this was only a 40-minute edition.

I hope you enjoyed the walk-through nearly as much as I enjoyed editing the picture :)

If you want to take a look at the PSD, I uploaded it to Mega. Here's the Download link