HOW TO CREATE A FIREBALL EFFECT

This is sort of a spinoff of the Burning text effect, but I've heard people ask for it, so I thought I'd put it up here.
Start off with the same setup as you did for burning text: black background, white foreground, then create a circular selection by clicking on the rectangular marquee, going to the Options palette, then changing the shape to "elliptical." Now, hold down the shift key and drag.
Inside the circle, create a circular gradient. Now, do the Burning text technique: Rotate 90° counter clockwise, then apply Wind (Filter/Stylize/Wind), then rotate 90° again, then Wind again, and so on until the whole shape is windized (windatized? winded? winny?). As you may have observed, this is indeed a pretty ugly shape. Hopefully it'll end up better. Blur it--I'd suggest a radius of 2.5 to 3 pixels, then apply the Ripple filter (Filter/Distort/Ripple). Colorize using your mode of choice.


This is the fireball with
Hue/Saturation and Contrast adjusted.
Not everyone's cup of tea, but an
interesting shape...

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