Photoshop Text Effects: Worn And Torn Text

Step 5: Make A Jagged Selection Through The First Letter, Then Select The Rest Of The Word

Grab your Polygonal Lasso tool from the Tools palette. It's hiding behind the Lasso tool, so just click and hold your mouse down on the Lasso tool icon and then select the Polygonal Lasso tool from the fly-out menu that appears:

Then, with the Polygonal Lasso tool selected, make a jagged selection through the first letter from top to bottom. Notice I didn't say drag a selection, and that's because you don't drag with the Polygonal Lasso tool. All you do is click inside the document once with your mouse, then release the mouse button and move your mouse to create a line. Click again, move the mouse again. Click, move, click, move, and so on. Make sure you create a jagged line through the letter, not a straight line, since this is going to be our first tear point.

Once you have your jagged line through the letter, finish your selection by clicking and moving your mouse around the rest of the word to the right of your selection line, so you end up with the entire word selected except for the left part of the first letter, as I have here:

Step 6: Cut The Selection Onto A New Layer

When you're happy with your selection, press Ctrl+Shift+J (Win) / Command+Shift+J (Mac) to cut the selection onto a new layer. You won't see much happen yet in your Document Window, but in your Layers palette, you'll see that your selection is now on a new layer, and the only part of the word remaining on the original text layer below it is the left part of the first letter which wasn't selected:

Step 7: Rotate The Letters Using The Free Transform Command

We're going to create our first tear in the text. With the new layer selected in the Layers palette, press Ctrl+T (Win) / Command+T (Mac) to bring up the Free Transform box and handles around the letters (minus the left half of the first letter, which is on the layer below). Look in the center of the Free Transform box and you'll see a small target icon:

We're going to rotate the text a little to create the tear, and this target icon represents the spot where everything is going to rotate around. We don't want the letters to rotate around the center. We want them to rotate from the top left corner, so to fix that, simply click on the target icon with your mouse and drag it up to the top left corner. It will snap into place as you approach the corner:

Once you've dragged the target icon to its new location, simply move your mouse anywhere outside of the Free Transform box, then click and drag your mouse up or to the left to rotate the letters counterclockwise, creating a tear through the first letter as I'm doing here:

Press Enter or Return when you're happy with the tear you've created to accept the transformation. Here's my text so far with a nice big tear through the letter "F":

We're going to do the same thing with the rest of the letters next.