Creating Spark Effects!

1. Find yourself a picture of sparks. I like to pick ones with the most contrast, or the easiest to erase a background for. Make sure to resize your image for a web safe size, since [it's likely that] an image you are borrowing from the internet will be lower resolution:




2. Make sure you have 'white' selected as your foreground color, and then use the "Color Range..." tool in the selection palette:




3. In the "Color Range" options window, set the Fuzziness to the maximum (at 200, in this case). Click "Ok.":




4. Once selected, pull the sparks onto your image:




5. Next, change the Layer Attributes from "Normal" to something else (I usually try "Screen" first); if that doesn't look quite right, try another one:




6. For this image, I actually put it on "Vivid Light":




7. Then, zoom in, lower the opacity (so you can see what you're doing), and then erase around the item, making the sparks (in this case, I only erased the lower part of the ax and left the rest of the sparks.):




8. Lastly, restore the opacity:





That's it!

Attached Thumbnails