The following is a short tutorial to explain an easy and simple way to make a photograph or image
appear as if it is torn in a few pieces. There are probably as many ways to do this but I think this is an easy and simple way.                              

I hope you enjoy it.  

The following is a short tutorial to explain an easy and simple way to make a photograph or image appear as if it is torn in a few pieces. There are probably as many ways to do this but I think this is an easy and simple way.    

I hope you enjoy it.  

Start by opening the image that you want to tear up. I duplicated the image and closed the original.  I used an image that I took a while ago, and added a border around it so it would look like a postcard. I resized the image to 600 wide by 450 for this tutorial.

Now open up a new image that is about 200 pixels bigger in width and height than your photograph. This will give you a little bit of space to wiggle about. To complement this image I chose an orange color from within the tulip ( I will adjust the color later).

 Next we want it to appear as if the photograph is on some surface area that is not too sleek.. so we are going to add a bit of homemade texture by first adding some noise:

As you can see, I've clicked the monochromatic button, which will assure the noise added is all in the same tones as the color of my background and we've selected Gaussian with will make the noise random. For this image, I've chosen to add 7% noise. 

 Now I want this to look more like a texture..and not just a pixelly image, so I'm going to add a bit of blur.

Now that we have prepared our background, we will now drag and drop our photograph onto this colored base. To do so, set your tool to the move tool :

simply left-click and hold down your mouse button and pull your image onto this base.  This is what my image looks like now:

We are now ready to do our first tear. 

 Click on your lasso tool:

With the lasso tool, we will make an erratic selection. What is important is the portion inside the photograph.. just select all around the piece that you want to tear off something like this:

 Of course, we want to work this selection on a layer of it's own, so we will now press CTRL and J at the same time. This will take our new selection that we just made and put it on a layer all by itself.  You will now notice that although on a layer by itself, it is no longer selected. 

Press CTRL and click the thumbnail and it will now be selected. Now that the portion we want to tear is selected, we want to delete the portion in the original file beneath because we will be rotating the piece above it and don't want the other to show through.

 Simply highlight the layer with the original image, and press DELETE on your keyboard. That portion of your image will disappear.

 You can verify this by closing the little eye that is to the left of your ripped piece and it will show the image below it without the torn piece.  Once you're assured it's gone, reclick on the eye and now select the layer with the lone piece ... called layer 2 here for the moment. 

 When you rip a real photograph, the hard surface  atop splits and makes a softer tear beneath which often looks like little fuzz. We want to recreate this look. 

The next step may not be necessary for everyone, if you are used to playing around with your brushes you can skip it. If you are a beginner, I think it would be safer to do as it will kind of guarantee you not making a mess.

-optional step:

Your piece is already selected so do the following: SELECT/MODIFY/EXPAND like this:

For this tear, I set it to 12 pixels. This will expand the selection and make sure you don't paint further than this which would not look good.

Now we set our brush to a small hard brush, here I chose a size 9 brush, set to  100% opacity and 100% flow.

 Now paint portions along the inside edge of the tear. Remember that you will probably not see the complete line of the underlying paper, as photos tear unevenly so leave a few places where the paper beneath doesn't show through, something like this:

Click Select/Deselect and then CTRL click the thumbnail to select only the portions that are opaque on that layer.

 Now we want to make the piece to appear to be on top of the other so we need a bit of a dropshadow. To access the layer style, click on the little 'F' in a circle and select drop shadow or even easier, just double click the thumbnail and a pop-up window will appear. Select drop shadow and change the settings for the opacity to 50% and the distance to 2 pixels. We don't want it to appear as if the photo is actually floating, just laying on a surface.

 

Click on your smudge tool:

We now want to rotate the entire piece so it looks natural. If your piece is not selected (no marching ants) do the CTRL and click on the thumbnail to select it... 

Now Do EDIT/TRANSFORM/ROTATE

Your first piece is done. 

Now we will redo all the steps as we did previously but with a tear we will make to the other side of the photograph. You don't necessarily have to do this, you can do one tear, you can tear it into 50 pieces, just make them all separate so you can move them around without disturbing the other pieces.

 So.. simply put.. we start over, but on the other side.

- make a selection with the lasso

-CTRL J to put it on another layer

-CTRL click to select

-select layer with original piece

-press delete

-go back to new tear piece

-if needed, make your selection bigger by expanding.  

-paint in your paper

-Deselect and reselect only the opaque parts by CTRL clicking the thumbnail of this new piece

-add a dropshadow

-with the smudgetool do our little zigzag trick to create fibers

-EDIT/TRANSFORM/ROTATE your piece

 when you are finished doing as many pieces as you wish..

go to your original layer.. and CTRL click the thumbnail and do the same steps to the portions of the photo  that are torn. Look at your torn pieces and put paper only on those spots that don't have them on the opposite side.. so only small portions of these edges should have the fibers showing. Do all the previous steps.. and finish by rotating your piece until you like the final result.

This is what the preceding steps gave me:

 I found the background a tad strong so I lowered the intensity in IMAGE/HUE/SATURATION until it appeals to me.

Since we've been careful to keep everything on different layers, you can easily change the background's colors, or even the entire background. You can fiddle and play around with your photo pieces and layer then in different orders so that some are on top and some below the original image. Use this tutorial as a starting point and most importantly, have fun! :-)