Tutorial - Folded Corner

This tutorial will show you how to achieve the look of a folded corner on a picture or piece of digital paper. Thanks to some awesome people on the Digital Scrapbook Memories forum for helping me figure this out. I used Photoshop CS2 for this tutorial, but I think the process is the same (or very similar) in Elements.

1. Select the polyagonal lasso tool (red circle below) to select a corner of your picture. Delete this corner of the picture. Keep this area selected until I tell you to deselect it or some of the steps won't work correctly.

2. Create a new layer and fill this layer with white (or whatever color you would like the back).
3. Go to Edit>Transform>Flip Vertical (or horizontal depending on the side you are folding).
4. Now use your move tool to rotate this piece to line up with the deleted portion of your picture (see picture below).

5. Now get your brush tool. Choose a round brush that has undefined edges (these are in the assorted brush set that comes with photoshop).
6. Create a new layer for your brush stroke.
7. Use a dark brown or grey color to paint a stripe along the outside edge of the fold. If you still have this area selected (marching ants around the fold) then the stroke will only appear on the fold (see photo below).

8. With the brush stroke layer selected, change the opacity and fill percentages until the brush stroke looks more like shading; you will find these options in the layers palette. A good example can be seen below. For this example I have opacity at 31% and fill at 43%.

9. To add a little more dimension to your shading, repeat steps 5-8. This time make your brush stroke further down on the outside edge of the fold. Make sure you have this stroke on its own layer so you can change the opacity to different percentages. This stroke you end up being a darker than the previous one. In my example, I have the opacity at 48% and fill at 76%.

10. Now you can deselect the layer by going to Layer>Deselect of pushing Ctrl + D.

11. Add a drop shadow to the original fold layer. I made my drop shadow with these amounts: Distance and size at 22 and spread at 30. You can adjust these to whatever looks right to you.

12. The last step is to merge all the layers together. Go to Layer>Merge Visible. Now you can move your photo onto your layout.

If you want to save your photo with the fold, make sure to go to File>Save As and name it something different than the original.

Here's the final look! If you have any questions, feel free to ask and I will try to help you out. Good luck and happy scrapping!!