I set the glass on a black paper background and shot it on its own with two speedlights either side, slightly backlighting it. I then removed the glass and set up an incense cone in the same position and kept the lighting unchanged. I shot the smoke several times and then selected the four that I thought would work together. I did some basic editing in Lightroom and then imported the files into Photoshop as separate images.
For each of the smoke images, I cropped out the incense cone and the box it was sitting on and added a hue/saturation layer to each one. I selected "colorize" and adjusted the settings to get the appropriate colours. I then flattened each smoke image and copied and pasted them onto the glass image as separate layers.
For each of the four smoke layers, I changed the blending mode to Lighten. I then added a layer mask to each of the smoke layers and used a soft brush to paint black into the mask to hide any smoke that appeared to break through the sides of the glass and any stray coloured light on the backgrounds.
Date: 23/01/2023
Photographer: Nick McDonald
