
Image © Richard D. LeCour
I often create neat effects in Photoshop, but I just as often forget how to recreate them simply because I quickly move on to other unrelated projects. I began to piece together some neat old treasure-map-like paper yesterday and realized that I didn’t want to forget how to make it this time. Thus, this mini tutorial on the creation of old, burned paper was born.
- Create a new transparent image, filled with black. I started with 800 by 600.
- Use the rectangular marquee to select a rectangle about 50 pixels inside each edge.
- Fill the selected area with white, and deselect
- Apply filter -> brush strokes -> spatter, set at a mid-range smoothness and whatever radius looks good to you. I used a radius of 21 and smoothness set at 8.
- Using a contiguous, aliased magic wand with a low tolerance, select the white in the middle of your image.
- Invert the selection, delete, then deselect.
- Rename this layer ‘paper’, and lock the transparent pixels.
- Create a new normal layer called ‘background’. Fill it with black, and put it behind the ‘paper’ layer.
- Select a medium parchment-like foreground color, and a medium-to-dark brown background color. It will be lightened later.
- Apply filter -> render -> clouds.
- Apply filter -> texture -> grain, with a low intensity of your choosing, contrast set to 50, and grain type as contrasty.
- Create a new color burn layer called ‘burn’, positioned in front of the ‘paper’ layer.
- On the ‘burn’ layer, use a medium-sized, soft-round airbrush with a medium brown color to brush the edges. Repeat up to four times, each time with a darker brown color and smaller brush than before. I started with a 100-pixel brush and ended up painting the final black with a 45-pixel brush.
Eureka! The islands and images seen on the example I later added for effect.
Great. Thanks! I will test this tutorial out on a school project im working on.
That was excellent! I’ve tried it out and it works REALLY well !!! Thanks a lot man!
nice it was very use full for one of my projects, thx
Simple yet very effective. cheers
Vic
Thanks for the tutorial. Nice work.
For those of you who want smoother edges after using this tutorial, you may find this useful:
On the paper layer, add the following style:
Bevel and Emboss
Style: Inner Bevel
Technique: Smooth
Depth: 121%
Direction: Up
Size: 1px
Soften: 1px
Angle (put a dot right in the center of the angle circle).
Enjoy!
Witam wszystkich jest fajnie. Dobry tutorial wreszcie coś konkretnego szukalem i wreszcie znalazlem
Thanks! Useful and great. Used it with different brushes with burn
cool and simple. nice effect! many thanx!
Very effective! nice work!