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Make a newspaper tear in Photoshop

For political direct mail, with the amount of news coverage and articles written about candidates and school bond measures, the newspaper tear is an important part of many pieces, like this piece, for Barbara Smith for State Representative. In this tutorial you'll learn how to make a nice, clean-looking newspaper tear. You will need either a scanner or a digital camera for this tutorial.

Step 1: Grab a piece of blank paper and rip an interesting shape from it, leaving the corners a little ragged. Also, crumple it a little bit to get a just-read kind of look. If you can find a blank piece of actual newspaper, that would be the best.

Step 2: Place the ripped paper on your scanner and cover it with a dark black cloth or paper, so that there's as much contrast as possible between the paper and the background. If you're using a digital camera, just put the torn paper against a dark background and photograph in good light. Remember to set the resolution to something high - at least 200 DPI for print. You can always shrink it down later no problem, but bumping up the resolution is harder. You should have something that looks like this:

Step 3: Adjust the contrast so that the background is completely black and you can see some texture in the paper. Now, using the magic wand tool (shortcut key: "w") select the black background. Go to SELECT > MODIFY > EXPAND and expand the selection by 1 or 2 pixels. Click "Delete".

Step 4: You should now have the newspaper tear on a transparent background.

Step 5: Double-click the paper layer and give it a drop shadow. I used a 45% opacity, 3px distance and 5px size, but you will probably have to use larger values if you're working with high resolution.


Step 6: With the text tool, add your headline. I like to use a dark gray instead of a black since it looks more like real newspaper print. Set the blending mode to "Multiply"

Step 7: Now, place your newspaper tear on your direct mail piece, website, or whatever, and you're good to go!

Click here to see this technique used in an actual direct mail piece!

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