Scanning or photographing paper to add a deckled edge

There are a variety of different ways you can add edge effects to your images. One of my favorite ways is to use either a scan or a photograph of torn paper. So let's like these two images and I want to open them in Photoshop. So I'll use command or control+o in order to open those. Now I want to see the torn paper image so I"ll hold down the control key and tap the tab key. That's the same keyboard shortcut on both platforms. And this is jsut a scan of some water color paper that I ripped.

They key is you put it on the scanner and then you leave the scanner lid open. And when it scans, the light falls off and it will look like there's a black background. Of course you could also photograph the white paper on a black background. So what we need to do is we need to select the edge that we want to use. So I'm going to choose the Marquee tool. And I will click and drag around this edge. And I don't have to do a, a careful selection it's not like I'm trying to select the white area or anything. I want both the black and white area.

And then I can use my move tool, so I'll tap the v key and position my cursor inside of the marquee. You can see it's got the little scissor icon that tells me that I'm going to cut this. Well I'm actually going to copy it cause I'm going to move this up to the nest image tab and that will bring my other document to the foreground. Then without releasing the cursor, I'll just drag it into the image area and let go. So here's my edge, you can see it came in as layer one. And depending on the color edge you want, if you want black or white, we can do this one of two ways. I'm going to go ahead and move this up to the top here. And then I am going to make a duplicate of it. Easiest way to do that is Cmd+j or Ctrl+j and see I now have a copy of that edge, we could go back to the original source file for the edge and copy a different edge, but for simplicity I'm just going to use the same edge on all four sides of my image in this video.

So, now I just need to transform this. I can use Cmd+T on Mac or Ctrl+T on Windows, and then I can use my context-sensitive menu. So, I can Ctrl-click with Mac, or I can right mouse click, and choose to flip this vertically. Then I'll just re-position it by dragging, down at the bottom of my image. I'll just scoot it over a little bit, so that I don't have the exact same edge, on both sides of the image. An tap Enter or Return. I'll use Cmd+J again to make another duplicate.

And Command T or Control T on Windows. And I'm going to rotate this, so I need to position my cursor outside of the bounding box and then I'll click and drag. If I hold down the Shift key I can limit the rotation, can see how it is constrained to 15 degree increments and I'll just position this over on the left side. Tap enter return, and one more time command J or control J and then command T or control T, right mouse click and then flip this one horizontally, scoot it over to the other side, maybe reposition it up a little bit.

And tap Enter or Return. So I have my edges here but I have to decide do I want black edges or white edges? Well let's start with black edges. So on my Layers panel, I'm going to Select all of the Layers here that we just duplicated. And then I'll go to the Blend Mode menu. And I'll chose Multiply. And when I choose Multiply, Photoshop will automatically get rid of the white pixels. And then we can see the varying levels of gray.

Being multiplied with the layer underneath it. But some of you might want white edges. So instead, I will change Multiply back to normal, and then I'm going to select each layer individually. And really quickly, I'll use a keyboard shortcut. The keyboard shortcut is for Image Adjustments and then Invert, so I'll use Command-I on the Mac or Control-I on Windows On the first layer, second layer, third layer, and fourth layer. Now that all of those have been inverted, I just need to select them all on my Layers panel and this time, instead of using Multiply, I'll use Screen, and we'll get our white edges.

And of course if I think the edge is too thick or I want to reposition it we can select each individual Layer and then we can move that around and reposition it. We could use Cmd or Ctrl+T and I could rotate it, scoot it up a little bit if I think that there's too big of a white edge. You can see that each one of these layers is completely editable and completely independent. So, there you have it, a very simple way to add a unique edge to your image.