Add smoke effect to a photo

In this tutorial you will learn to add smoke to a photo using a secondary photo of clouds.

1. First of all we need two images, one that contains a smoke (fog, steam, etc.), and the other is the image on which we will apply the effect. It's best they have the same dimensions.

2. Drag and drop holding the Shift key. This will ensure that both layers are perfectly centered. The next step is to desaturate the layer that contains the smoke: Image » Adjustments » Desaturate or Ctrl + Shift + U.

3. With the same layer, that contains the smoke, selected, choose Blending Screen press Ctrl + L to enable the window Levels. Move the slider until you get an effect that is more to your liking.

4. If you want you can add a Layer Mask to the layer which contains the smoke and paint over certain areas using the Brush Tool to give illusion that the smoke is behind the subject.

6. Final result is shown below: