Summary: Finish your photos off with a bang by adding real fireworks to them in Photoshop. If you can paint with a brush and change a layer blend mode, you have all the skills you need to fill your night skies with huge explosions and brilliant colors!

Written by Steve Patterson
Exclusively for Photoshop Essentials.com.

Part of our complete collection of Photo Effects tutorials.

In this Photoshop Effects tutorial, we're going to learn how to add fireworks to a photo. What you'll need is a photo of fireworks and the photo you want to add the fireworks to (preferably a nighttime shot, since fireworks tend not to look very impressive in the middle of the afternoon).

Blending the two images together is easy. If you can paint with a brush and change a layer blend mode, you have all the Photoshop skills you need.

Here's the photo of fireworks I'll be using:

Here's the image I want to add the fireworks to:

And here's what the final image will look like:

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Let's get started.

Step 1: Drag The Fireworks Photo Into The Other Photo

Open both images in Photoshop so that each one is in its own separate document window on the screen. We need to get the fireworks photo into the other photo, and with both images open in their own document window, all we need to do is drag the fireworks photo into the other photo's document window. To do that, we need the Move Tool, so select it from the Tools palette or press the letter V on your keyboard to quickly access it with the keyboard shortcut:

Then with the Move Tool selected, click inside the fireworks photo and drag it over into the other photo:

When you release the mouse button, the fireworks photo will appear above the second photo in the same document window, and if we look in the Layers palette, we can see that it's been placed on its own separate layer, with the fireworks photo on "Layer 1" at the top:

You can close out of the document window containing the fireworks photo by itself at this point, since we no longer need it.