I’ve long been interested in finding a way to get that messy edge similar to what you see on Polaroid transfers but I want to achieve it in Photoshop and in a way that I can easily reproduce it without having to go through too many steps. Today I revisited this project and moved a little closer to my goal. Through the use of various texture shots I’ve collected over the years, masks made with rough-edged brushes and a liberal use of layer blend modes, I can now drop any image into this Photoshop document and it will give the above result with minor tweaking.

It’s still not entirely what I was shooting for. I wasn’t initially going for the overall aged look — I just wanted the edge. But, to my eye, the edge fit better when I textured the entire image. I’ll keep playing with it. Every attempt comes closer…