Ron's flames brush question

I did a search and a few people have mentioned this but I have not seen anyone having this issue, and those threads are rather old, so I thought I would start a new topic.

I bought Ron's Flames and Explosions today. I have not tried explosions. Flames had a short tutorial in it. The basic thrust of the tutorial is, start with a blank canvas in PS (I have the current CC version of PS) with a black background. You turn the background off, add a new layer, and stamp your flame brush on it in black. This is the first step with a problem, as far as I can tell... because the one in the tutorial looks WAY darker than the one that I get when I stamp it. The instructions clearly say stamp ONCE... so I am not sure other than stamping once in black what I can do to make it darker. I think this is then affecting every other step along the way.

Anyway, the next step is duplicate the black flame layer and lock the transparent parts, and swap the color to bright yellow. I do that and, again, it looks similar but not as dark and clear as the screenshots in the tutorial. Then you duplicate that layer, make it orange, and do a color burn, and then duplicate the layer again.

Now, what I come up with at the end of following this tutorial looks OK... but it is not as vibrant and realistic looking as the one in the tutorial. I have tried various things like duplicating the layers more than once, but although it makes the flame appear more... for lack of a better term, solid... it does not bring out the vibrancy. I have tried other color options, to no good effect (adding more reds, different oranges). To show what I mean, here is what it looks like when I follow the instructions exactly, even using the exact colors in Ron's tutorial (he says the exact color doesn't matter, and from my experiments he's right, but I did it exactly just for comparison). My effort is on the left. His example in the tutorial is on the right.

Has anyone used these enough to know what is going on and why I am getting so much more of a "faded" one-dimensional look to these flames compared to the tutorial? I'm kind of stuck at this point... not sure what to change to make it look more vibrant and realistic.