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In this tutorial you’ll learn how to make a realistic burnt paper effect in Photoshop. This effect is easy to create and looks great! We’ll show you how to create the paper as well as the burnt edge in this tutorial, but you can apply it to easily “age” the edges of other images by making them look like they’ve been burned.
1. The Background
Start by making a new document, I used 500×500px with default DPI.
For a nice background effect, I filled the Background layer with #572513, and applied a few filters. The filters I used are as follows:
Filter > Noise > Add Noise
Filter > Brush Strokes > Sprayed Strokes
Filter > Artistic > Underpainting
2. The Paper
Paper isn’t completely square, but it’s usually rectangular, but for this tutorial I’m just making my paper square. You can do the same, my selection in the middle of the document is 400×400. On a new layer fill your selection with white (#FFFFFF)
Apply the following Outer Glow to the ‘paper’ layer.
With the Lasso Tool (L) 
make an odd-shaped cut selection like so:
Press delete on your keyboard to delete inside of the selection.
