This tutorial will show you a really fast and easy way to make old/aged paper.

In the beginning, there was paper… 

I made a canvas size of 600x800px, with a black background for this tutorial.  On a new layer, I filled it with a solid light yellow papery color.  The beginning color doesn’t make a whole lot of difference, as we are going to adjust it a little later to make it look more like paper. 

Select the eraser tool, and one of the charcoal brushes.  Go to the Brushes tab for some adjustments to the brush. You can adjust both Shape Dynamics and Scattering to a desired randomness. 

Tear the Edges

Resize your eraser to a desired size and erase along the edges.  It should look like you’ve got torn edges on your paper.

Think they look a little uniformly torn?  Adjust the eraser-brush again by changing some of the attributes in the Scattering section of Brushes, and go along the edges in a less even way.  Dip into the sides of the paper, cutting into it so it looks like someone tore it a little more haphazardly.

Crumple the Paper

Double-click on the layer of your torn paper, and it will bring up the Layer Style window.  You’re going to want to add a Pattern Overlay.  Select the blue bubbles, or a pattern you have that you like, and scale it up to 1000%, and work your way back down again if you think it’s too big.  Adjust the opacity of the pattern so you can see the original piece of torn paper through the pattern.  It should start to look like it’s been crinkled some.

Time to Age the Paper

Preserve the layer’s transparency on the Layers window.  Select a more brownish color and fill in the paper with that color.

Select the Burn tool (located with the Dodge and Sponge tool).  Change the Exposure of the burn tool to about 20%, and Range: Midtones.

You can really use whatever kind of brush you want for this.  I used a brush similar to the one I used to tear the edges of the paper, then went back in with a really large, Soft Round brush (probably at about size 600).

Take a Little More Off the… everywhere.

Unlock the transparency of your layer. Grab yourself another paper-edge-tearing-eraser and go back in where you’ve burned the edges of the paper.  Erase some here, and over there, and make the corners less cornery.

Double-click on your layer and add an inner glow if you want to make the edges of the paper stand out just a tiny bit.

And now, for a little texture!  Make some noise!

Go to the menu and to Filter>Noise>Add Noise… I added 2.51 on the scale, and Uniform for the Distribution.

Done!

It’s nothing fancy, but by gosh it’s a piece of paper.  This one looks a little like a piece of crinkled paper bag.

Here’s another idea of what you can do with paper: Writerspace.net

Let me know what you think.  Thanks!