Giving A Photo Rounded Corners In Photoshop
Learn Photoshop with Photoshop Effects at Photoshop Essentials.com
Written By Steve Patterson
In this Adobe Photoshop tutorial, we're going to look at how easy it is to create rounded photo corners. As with most things in Photoshop, there's about 17 different ways to create rounded corners, but we're going to make things interesting by looking at a way to do it using something in Photoshop that many people don't even know about - vector masks! What's a vector mask? Well, if you think layer masks are fun (you do think layer masks are fun, right?), you're going to love vector masks. We'll get to them in a moment.
Any graphic designer knows that one of the ways to get people feeling a certain way when they look at a design is through the use of shapes. Different shapes have different effects on us. Some shapes appear warm, friendly and fun, while others seem cold, rigid, more serious. You don't need to be a design expert though to experience this for yourself. Just grab a pencil and a piece of paper, draw yourself a square, then a circle, and ask yourself which one seems more appealing to you. Chances are, unless you're the type of person who enjoys spending Saturday nights reorganizing your filing cabinet (not that there's anything wrong with that), you'll pick the circle. People love circles. They're the "warm, friendly and fun" shapes. In fact, it doesn't even have to be a complete circle. You can take a square or a rectangle with its harsh, right-angled corners, which normally doesn't seem very fun to us at all, give it rounded corners instead, and suddenly it will seem like the life of the party!
Okay, so that may be exaggerating things a bit, but rounded corners definitely look more appealing to us than sharp right angles. It's a bit unfortunate then that every time we take a photo, even if it's a photo of a kid's birthday party with balloons and party hats, the photo still ends up with sharp corners. That may be fine if we're simply getting the photos printed, but what if we want to use the photo in a design or a collage? How do we convert those sharp corners into round ones?
The answer? Very easily, especially when we use a vector mask! In fact, not only can we give the photo rounded corners, we have complete control over just how rounded they are!
Here's the image I'll be using for this Photoshop tutorial:
Let's see how easy it is to round off those corners.
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Step 1: Add A Layer Mask
I've opened a new blank Photoshop document, filled the Background layer with black to help make it easier for us to see what's happening, and then dragged my photo into the new document. We can see the document here, showing the photo in front of the black background:
And if we look in the Layers palette, we can see the photo sitting on its own layer, "Layer 1", above the Background layer:
With "Layer 1", or whichever layer your photo happens to be on, selected, click on the Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers palette:
Nothing will appear to have happened in your document, but if we look at the layer in the Layers palette, we can see that we now have a layer mask thumbnail to the right of the layer's preview thumbnail:
We won't be covering layer masks in this tutorial since we won't be using them, but if you want to learn more about layer masks, be sure to check out our full Understanding Layer Masks tutorial in our Photoshop Basics section.
Step 2: Add A Vector Mask
Okay, so if we're not going to be using the layer mask, why did we just add it? Well, we're about to do something that many people never do. We're going to see something that many people never see. Why? Because we're not "many people". We're different from them. Those people click on an icon once, see what it does, and then take a nap. It never occurs to them that maybe, just maybe, if they were to click on that exact same icon a second time, well, there's at least a slim chance that something else might happen! And it's too bad for them because in this case, something else will happen!
I know it sounds crazy, but now that we've added our layer mask, click once again on that exact same Layer Mask icon:
If you have "Show Tool Tips" enabled in your Photoshop Preferences, you may already have noticed something a little different when you hovered your mouse over the icon. No longer does the tool tip say "Add layer mask" like it normally does. Instead, it now says "Add vector mask", and as soon as we click on the icon, if we look at the layer in the Layers palette, we get what appears to be a second layer mask thumbnail to the right of the first one. The difference is, it's not a second layer mask thumbnail. It's a vector mask thumbnail:
Both the layer mask thumbnail on the left and the vector mask thumbnail on the right look exactly the same, but there's a big difference between a layer mask and a vector mask. Both are used to show and hide different parts of the layer, but the way they go about it is completely different. With a layer mask, we paint on it, usually with the Brush Tool, to make different parts of the mask either white, black, or some shade of gray in between. White makes that part of the layer visible, black hides it, and gray makes that area partially visible depending on how light or dark the shade of gray is.
Vector masks, on the other hand, don't require any painting at all. In fact, you can't paint on them because Photoshop won't let you. Instead, we use shapes to control which parts of the layer are visible or hidden. In fact, we're going to use a shape right now to create our rounded corners!
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