Old Paper Background Texture In Photoshop

In this Photoshop effects tutorial, we'll learn how to create a simple old paper texture, great for use as a scrapbooking background for displaying old, antique photos! I'll be using Photoshop CS5 here but any recent version of Photoshop will work.
Here's what our old paper texture will look like when we're done:

The final result.

And here's just one example of how it can be used as a background for a photo layout:

A scrapbooking-style photo layout with the paper texture as the background.

3D Text

The first thing we will do is to draw a curve. Set the Fill color to None, and select the Pen Tool () by pressing P, and draw a smooth curve. You can hold down the Alt key while dragging anchor points to smooth parts of the curve, if you couldn't do it right the first time.