Creative Flash Photography

Workshop 33

Using Smoke to Depict Aroma

▸ How to photograph smoke

▸ Inverting and coloring smoke shots in Photoshop

▸ Capturing additional details for a photomontage

A few months ago I saw an advertisement for Lipton tea that used some kind of cloud to symbolize the product’s aroma. The effect looked like colored smoke, and I began to think about how to reproduce the effect. Smoke is relatively simple to photograph and can easily be inverted and colorized in Photoshop, but the rest of the scene shown was more difficult to construct. My final image is a composite of three different shots: the smoke, the teabag, and some tea leaves. By the time I produced a result that looked something like the original, I had used a lot of tea bags.

The Setup ...