Images with Jagged Edges

Question

On some blog posts I've seen images where they have a jagged/torn edge to them on one side which gives it a nice effect. I tried to post a crude Paint.Net imitation of what I am looking for:

The image itself is actually in the black area and the edges are cut off with a bit of a drop shadow. What I'm looking for is possibly a plugin for Paint.Net that would give me a similar effect, or an easy example of how to do this. Since I'm actually a programmer my graphic skills are limited to resizing images and not much else.

Answer 1

As a programmer, you may find TechSmith's snag-it to be a useful tool. This is a screen capture utility, and as such, it has a number of built-in features for cropping and edging images exactly as you describe. The degree of 'jaggedness', fade, drop-shadow etc. is all configurable. The snag-it editor is a decent graphic editing tool, not as capable as paint.net, but certainly completely inter-operable by means of copy-paste or a variety of supported save image formats.

Snag-it is not free software, but it's good value for this and some other effects that facilitate annotating and highlighting parts of an image.