This tutorial will show you how to make real fire that together with good photography can be used to make impressive results

Step 1: We need a car for this tutorial so you can get one from the Internet or use the picture below

Open this picture in Photoshop, press D and X to reset your background and foreground colors

Step 2: Create a new layer and press Ctrl-Backspace to fill it with black. You should reduce the opacity of this layer to 70% so we can see our car

Step 3: Go to Filter > Render > Lens Flare and try to put this flare on the center of our front wheel

Step 4: Use the Elliptical Marquee Tool (maybe you have to right click on the Marquee Tool and select Elliptical Marquee Tool option) to draw an ellipse. Be sure to make it bigger than our wheel and the lens flare must lie inside it 

Step 5: Go to Filter > Artistic > Plastic Wrap and use these settings:

Step 6: Expand the selection by going to Select > Modify > Expand and use a value of 30 pixels. We have to do it because we need more space for the next effect

Step 7: Now go to Filter > Distort > Twirl and set a big angle:

Step 8: Press Ctrl-D to deselect. Go to Filter > Stylize > Wind and use these settings:

Press Ctrl-F twice to make this effect stronger

Step 9: Now this is the most important step. We will make the fire by going to Filter > Liquify. Use an average brush size (about 19 pixels) with the Forward Warp Tool to play with your image. Here is my suggestion ^_^ (please remember we are in the Liquify dialog box)

Now it doesn't look like a real fire but be patient, we will do it soon!

Step 10: Change the opacity of your "fire" layer (Layer 1 by default) to 100% again

Step 11: Press Ctrl-B to open up the Color Balance dialog box, we just need to adjust its hightlights so click on the Highlights option and use these settings:

Step 12: Change the Blending Mode of Layer 1 to Screen to eliminate black areas

Step 13: Go to Edit > Transform > Warp and move the right-bottom point upward (red arrow). We can see the bottom of our fire move up a little (green arrow)

Step 14: We need to adjust the color of our fire so go to Image > Adjustments > Levels (or press Ctrl-L) and use these settings:

Step 15: We are going to finish! Go to Filter > Distort > Ripple and use a value around 115%

And ...finish! This is the final result

Try to play with the other wheel. In the picture below, I just duplicate it and use the Warp Tool but why you don't try to create one after reading this tutorial :)

This tutorial is long but in general you can create a nice fire with:

    + A shape of the object you want to burn ^_^

    + Wind, Ripple, Liquify filters

    + Color Balance, Levels to color the image

Other tools and filters are just optional, use it if you like

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