Adobe Photoshop is the king of illusion. It allows for bad skin to appear flawless, plain landscapes to appear lush and boring squares to have nice torn edges. Being that t he torn edge look is one of my favorite effects to abuse, I decided to share my method of accomplishing this through Adobe Photoshop.

In this tutorial we will be utilizing layer masks, the lasso tool and layer styles. If any of these are new to you, this is a good method to practice the use of each in a meaningful way.

1. Create our paper
Open a new document at a bigger size than you want your paper to be and paint the background layer a mid-dark color (your preference). Try selecting a color from your Swatch menu and pressing alt+delete to completely fill the page of it.
Once you have the page colored, create a new layer, select the Rectangle Marquee Tool(M), change your foreground color to white (or whatever color you want the paper to be) and draw a rectangle to represent it. Fill the rectangle with white and deselect the rectangle.

2. Tearing the paper
Select the Lasso Tool(L) and hold down your alt-key. Start near the edge of the white square and draw a rough inner square using the lasso tool. This new square represents the paper after it has been torn so take your time in ensuring that it looks adequately jagged, which works well if you move slowly in drawing the square.

Once you have completed the square release your alt-key and mouse so that the ends can meet for your jagged square shape. On the bottom of your “Layers” toolbar is an icon that looks like a white circle within a gray square, this is the vector mask, click it with the white rectangle layer selected. You should see the rectangular converted into the jagged edged version that we outlined.

On the layers palette, click on the new layer mask you have created (it will be next to your paper layer with a chain-link in between) to make sure that you are working on the mask and not the actual image.

3. Making the paper realistic
Select the Smudge tool(R), change options to 50% Strength, and a tiny brush size. Drag your brush along the edges of the paper in an erratic way. Remember the more random you make the smudge, the more realistic it will be, judge by sight and smudge until you are happy with the edges.

Click on the layer that has our paper (not the mask, we are done with that) and then select a Layer Style from the bottom (should look like an fx symbol). Select Drop Shadow and adjust it as needed until it looks real.

4. Kick it up a notch
Select an image that you would like to be on your torn paper and paste it into a new layer right above your current paper layer. Hold down your alt-key and left click the line in between the two layers (indicated on my example by the red circle). This will mask the image within our paper’s confines.

Ctrl-click the layer mask of the paper (the black square with the white shape). This should place running ants on the outline of the jagged paper. Make sure you now select the layer with the image on it and select inverse (ctrl+i). On the top menu go to select – modify – feather. Select 2-6 depending on how wide you want the white tear to appear around the image and then press delete 2 times.

There you have it, a torn image generated from Adobe Photoshop.