How to make a burnt edges effect with a fire negative

What it is

The burnt edges look does two things at once. It turns the picture into a negative and colours it like fire — the darkest areas black, then deep ember red, orange and a white-hot cream in the brightest places. Then it burns the border away: the edge of the picture is bitten in unevenly, a band of black char runs inside it, and a thin orange rim glows where the fire is still alive, its light spilling a little past the edge.

Designers use it when an image should feel dangerous, dramatic or nocturnal: a poster that looks pulled from a fire, a cover with heat in it. Because the burn follows the object’s own outline, it works on a full-bleed photo, on a cut-out person and even on a word.

Where it is used

It suits horror and thriller posters, night events, metal and techno releases, campfire and survival stories, editorial covers about crisis or heat, and Halloween posts. As a quieter move, use only the burn step on an ordinary photo for a scorched polaroid or a charred letter.

Made in Paletoo with this mix:

How to make it, step by step

1. Open your design and select the photo. A high-contrast picture with a strong light source works best; here it is a night poster, “Who keeps the light on when we are gone?”, with a full-bleed photo.

2. Open the Effects tab and find Mixes; press All if Burnt edges is not in the first row.

   

3. Press Burnt edges. Four steps go on under Applied: Invert turns the whole picture negative, a Gradient map maps it from black through ember red and orange to white-hot, a step also called Burnt edges chars the border with a glowing rim, and Grain adds a fine film texture.

   

4. Click the Burnt edges row — the step, not the mix card — to open it. Its presets are at the top: Charred, Embers (the one the mix uses), Scorched, Ash and Wildfire. Under them, Burn sets how deep the edge is eaten, Roughness how ragged it is, and Char the width of the black band.

   

5. Then the fire itself: the Embers slider sets how brightly the rim and the char glow, Ember colour their hue, Bite size how big the burnt bites are, and Seed gives a different burn with the same settings.

6. Press Export. The burn is measured in document pixels and drawn at the export’s resolution, so the char stays crisp in a large PNG or a PDF.

Watch it

Make it your own

Pick the kind of burn with a preset first, then refine. Scorched barely touches the edge — brown and black, almost no glow — and suits a page that only got too close to a candle. Ash is the burn gone cold: char and no ember. Wildfire takes big ragged bites with a fierce rim; save it for large posters, where the bites have room.

Burn goes up to 160 px and is measured on the document, not the screen, so judge it at the size you will export. On a word or a thin shape the burn is held to a share of the stroke, so letters are charred rather than eaten. If the fire bites into the subject, lower Burn or change Seed until the deepest bite lands on the background.

The fire colours come from the Gradient map: drag its stops to make more of the picture ember red or more of it white-hot, and match Ember colour to the gradient’s orange so the rim belongs to the same fire. For a burnt photo without the negative, turn off or remove the Invert and Gradient map steps and keep only the burn.

More effects

• 

  How to make an inverse burn effect

  Half negative, half positive, in electric blue.
• 

  How to make an inverse heat effect

  Half negative, half positive, in purple, magenta, orange and yellow.
• 

  How to make a torn edges effect, like Photoshop’s Torn Edges

  Ink and paper, split at a ragged, grainy edge.

Read the overview: graphic design trends 2026

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