rounded corners tutorial

You’ll notice in a lot of my pictures that I use rounded corners — I love the retro feel and uniqueness.

Uniqueness … is that a word? I’m not getting a spell-check notice, so I guess it is. Cool.

Anyway, I have a few people ask me how to get rounded corners, so I’m going to give you three ways to put rounded corners on your pictures.

The first way is the easiest … Picnik. It’s a {mostly} free online photo editing program — I say {mostly} because you can do a whole WHOLE lot for free. Or you can pay a small fee to have even more editing options. But the rounded corners option is free …

Anyway, it’s listed under the “Create” tab as a “Frame.” You can adjust the radius to make it either a little rounded or a LOT rounded.

The second way is also quite easy if you have Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

Just go to the “Develop” section, and then to “Vignettes — Post-Crop”

amount: +100
midpoint: 50
roundness: -90 (you can adjust this number to make it less or more rounded)
feather: 0

If you are putting the image on a black background (like a photo blog?) then just set the “amount” to -100.

And finally, this is how I do it in Adobe Photoshop Elements. Now, I don’t have Photoshop CS because I chose to purchase Lightroom instead. I honestly don’t know if it’s the same in Photoshop CS, but I’m sure it’s close enough.

step 1: open your image …

step 2: choose the “rounded rectangle tool” under shapes

step 3: set the radius to 90px

You can change that number to make it more or less rounded – I almost always use from 90px to around 94px.

step 4: draw the rounded rectangle around the entire image

It doesn’t matter what color the rectangle is, because you’re going to fix that in the next step

step 5: set opacity to 0%

step 6: while still having the “rounded rectangle tool” selected, right click on the image and select “make selection”

step 7: make sure you have “feather radius” set to 0px and check “anti-aliased”

step 8: go to “edit” on the menu bar and select “copy merged”

step 9: go to “file” and select “new -> image from clipboard”

step 10: save it and you’re done!

Now. Go have fun making rounded corners!! I love taking pictures and applying vintage’y presets or actions and then using the rounded corners … it takes me back to my childhood pictures.

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