Creating a “Torn Paper” Frame Effect in InDesign

One of the recent issues that I ran into with InDesign is that the program doesn’t have the same brushes and advanced masking capabilities that Photoshop does so when it comes to creating a document element like an object frame that looks like it was made from torn paper, InDesign presents us with some challenges.

There are probably a handful of ways to do this.  You can, of course, take the easy route and use the pencil tool to freehand the frame, but you’d have to be pretty good with the mouse or Wacom pad to get a realistic look.

Here’s a method that may seem complicated, but you can actually do it in less than 5 minutes.  This will also create a path based frame mask that can be re-sized with ease and can be used as a container for any graphic.

Here’s my process:

Find torn paper graphic to use as a model.  

There are tons of internet resources available for free.  For this example, I used this graphic from DeviantArt: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Torn-Paper-Big-Yellowed-3-176770942

Place the graphic into Photoshop & crop to size

Use the magic wand tool to select the paper.  I set tolerance to 180.

Make a new layer from copy and delete the originals so you have the paper on a transparent background.

Then, using the paint bucket tool, fill the selection area with black.  You may need to set the tolerance to 255 to get a complete fill with the color.

Add an alpha channel… 

…and make a work path from selection (these will be used in InDesign)

Save as a PSD file (I called mine Torn Paper Frame).

Now, let’s dive into InDesign…

Place the file in InDesign.

Select the object and choose the Clipping Path option under Object and select Options.

In the Clipping Path dialogue box, you can select either Detect Edges or Alpha Channel from the Type dropdown.  This is why we saved the Photoshop file with an Alpha channel.  For this example, select Alpha Channel.

Next, convert clipping path to Frame.  This is also under the Options>Clipping Path menu.  Notice how the border of the clipping path is now highlighted with a tan (in my example) border.

With the object still selected, choose File>Place and then select a graphic.

What if you want a solid color, not a picture?

Let’s say you don’t want a picture in the frame, you just want a solid colored object.  To do that, use the selection tool to highlight the frame, then click the graphic within the frame (the circle in the middle).  Your graphic will be highlighted by a brown border.

Delete the graphic leaving the path in its place.

Select the path with the Select tool and use a swatch or the color picker to select a fill color (and or border color).

This is how you can create a torn paper style frame which you can use to insert any graphic.  You can then select the graphic contained within the frame and resize it however you want relative to the frame to get the desired effect in your InDesign document.

Here’s an example of a different project in which I used the same methodology to create the torn paper looking elements:

Again, there are probably a ton of ways to achieve this effect, but I think that using a torn paper image and converting that into a path and then a frame in InDesign gives you a versatile object to use for your documents.  Even though there are a handful of steps, this is actually quicker and easier than it seems.  The thing that will take the longest is finding the graphic to use as a template for your torn paper.

If you really want to get fancy, you can pull the frame into Illustrator, convert it to a symbol and use 9 slice scaling to preserve the aspect ratio of the torn sides of the frame so that when resizing you don’t get any distortion in the edges.  But that’s material for another post!

I hope you’ve found this helpful & good luck on your own designs!

Ed