his is a quick way i use to create the effect of old paint splitting off.
It works also great for stamps and old inked-looking text. We'll go with a stamp here as it's the easiest.
Before you start, make sure you grab the needed rust texture.

irst, create the picture of the stamp in a separate layer, look that the white backround is a separate layer. The image i created was 800x600, the stamp itself around 700x450 with the intention to later use it at around the half of it's size.

Give the stamp the color you want it to have at the end, doesn't has to be exact, we'll fix the color at the end.

I wrote the tut with the idea of later using the stamp on a white or light backround.

ow, drop in the rust texture in a new layer.
Before we do anything else, we should know what this texture is going to do for us and why it has to be this one.

If you look closer at the rust texture you'll see it has lots of tone variations which
a. Will be seen on the stamp too giving it lighter/darker spots.
b. The darker tones are separated from the rest with mostly clean borders. This is good ...as we'll see soon.

If your stamp has almost the same size as mine (700x550pixels) then you can use the rust texture as it is.
If your project is larger, size up the rust texture, don't use the stamp tool to enlarge it. The idea is to keep the color spots at a certain size, they shouldn't be to small.

You can see on the picture the size of the darker spots, use it as orientation for the size on your project if it has another size. Not mad if the spots are a bit larger, but they really shouldn't be smaller.

Merge both layers. You may want to save first or at least duplicate the layers in case you want to play with the rust texture later to adjust it's size.

elect the just merged new layer and go to it's 'layer options' (2x click on the layer).

For a start, set it's blend from 0:255 to 49:255

You'll see that the darker spots now vanish in chunks (hopefully). Hard paint or ink falls off in chunks, that's why we had to keep the spots in the rust texture at a certain size.

If you didn't, and the spots turned out to small, you'll see only little spots and single pixels being cleared which looks crappy, unrealistic like in the second zoomed pic. In this case, stick your head in the fridge and think about it.

Of course, it depends on the theoretical size the piece you're working on would have in real life. If it's supposed to look like a real standard stamp around -4x6 cm- you'll need to have bigger chunks removed off the pic.
If instead it's supposed to look as if it were painted on a wall at -4x6 meters- you should use smaller chunks to give the illusion that the object is huge.

In my case here, it's rather something you could see on a wooden box or paper from 7 to around 20cm long perhaps.

Anyways, if you look a little closer to the now blank parts you'll notice that mostly, they have a darker border around them than the average tone of the stamp. Try to keep it.
When paints gets dry, old and loses it's adession, it often loses saturation and gets darker which are good signs that the paint can be scratched off easily with a fingernail.
If you change the blend of the layer to much you'll loose this.

e do want a bit more control over the damage would i say. Ignore for now the darker color on the pic at the left and work with yours as it is.

With the burn tool and a brush set to 30-50 hardness and 17 exposure (or whatever works best for you) we can slowly darken the parts on which we want more damage.
For this, i usually take a large brush (100-200) and work roughly on the parts i want to damage until i get the desired effect. Look to move the brush around a bit so you don't get a single spot that's darker than the average of the stamp.

I went with the burn tool around the outher border of the frame since it would be the most exposed.

With the dodge tool, you can repair parts you want undamaged.

I usually let the shades i got from the rust texture do the job as they get darker, looks the most natural, unlike messing around 'by hand' cutting out stuff and the like.

When done, we can duplicate the layer we have been working with and merge both layers again (original & duplicate). This way we can set the layer blend back to 0:255

With this done we can take care of the color, i already fixed it on the pic at the left. Moved the middle control of the levels to 0.75 to make it a bit darker and reduced the saturation by -30.

The stamp itself is theoretically done now but we can add a bit more to it.

Since we were smart, we keeped the first clean unedited version of the stamp picture in case anything happens. We can take a duplicate of it and put it under the finished stamp.
I set it's transparency to 22 having a white backround.
If you're going to use the stamp on another backround than white (but still more or less bright) you should change the backround from white to the one you're going to use later.

The goal is to have the layer visible but only a bit and give it, if your stamp is red too, an orange color. Depending on your backround you may have to messa round a bit, in my case i just changed the hue to +25.

If your stamp is is. green, try to go for a more pale and light green.

With the eraser set to 50% transparency and a large brush (200) i edited the layer, almost completely erased some parts and let mainly those untouched that are under the more damaged parts.

If you made it twice the size and size it down for use like i did, the proccess will soften the borders a bit which looks better than the hard borders you get from working at 1:1.

Still, after sizing down i always run an unsharp mask with the standard PS settings.

I took the stamp layer alone, without the transparent orange one, and ran a render/lightning effect over it.
The result is a glossy pic with structure coming from the rust texture that makes it look like fresh paint.

I'd give you the settings for the PS filter BUT i used the filter of MGX Pic. Publisher since i couldn't get it to look right with the PS one. If someone does, i'd happily put the proper settings here.

ike said at the top, you can do quite a few things this way. The best looking of them IMHO being old text. It's actually the same procedere one just has to pay more attention to the tones. Instead of using the rust texture  in luminosity like on the stamp try to use it in hardlight or overlay, in any case try to take advantage of the rusty colors as they'll add a lot to the 'old ink' feeling.
You might have to desature the rust up to 60-70% and play with the levels since old ink turns very dark and desatured with time but i'd definately use the rust to give the color and shades.

ou can also take a picture of the Mona Lisa and make the illusion it's an old painting on a concrete wall. Desature the original pic, put it on top of the rust texture and work as with the stamp. At the end you can overlay in softlight the mostly desatured rust texture again that will look like dirt/dust. Well, just trying to say that you can do a lot of effects out of this simple technique.

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