Parchment paper and especially burnt parchment paper along with grunge background and textures intrigue me so I decided to try the project of making realistic burnt parchment paper in Photoshop. I started out with a blank tan colored background. I added a little texture to the background then I added a layer and dirtied it by taking a brush and just dabbing with it using a darker brown color.

Next I added another layer on top of that a little smaller than the first giving it a little different shade of brown. I gave it a texture also and then changed the opacity so the other texture would show through. Then I added a fourth layer and made it kind of a bright yellow color. I used the multiply blending mode which intensified the color throughout. I imported a paper image and added it to the mix and desaturated it. Using the lasso tool, I selected a jagged rectangle around the whole piece, and then gave it a group mask.

I took a brush and touched the edges up with a dark brown color. After doing the whole edge, I duplicated the layer and gave it a Gaussian blur. I kept repeating that step over and over until it had the amount of burnt edge I wanted. This was a fun project I plan to try again.

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