Expert: LizaL - 9/11/2005

Question
Hello,

How do I make perfect rounded corners from a rectangular Adobe PhotoshopCS image on the Mac. Thank you for your help.

Christina

Answer
Hi Christina,

There are shape tools in Photoshop CS that are located in one square of the tool palette -- they're all in the 9th space from the top, on the right (or 3 up from the zoom tool). Hold down your mouse button while pointing on the top tool until you see the menu, and select Rounded Rectangle.

Once you've selected this shape tool, look up at the options bar, which is right below the pulldown menus at the top of your screen. There are 3 little buttons -- the first on the left lets you draw a filled shape, which in this case is just a mask on a layer. The middle button lets you draw a shape -- again, you're actually just drawing a mask on a layer. The third button will bring up a dialog box asking you to rasterize the layer -- that is, make it into a bitmap -- and if you say yes, and draw with the shape tool, you'll be drawing a solid shape onto your layer, and not just a layer mask.

It sounds kind of confusing until you do it a few times, but suffice to say, the third way is probably the easiest to understand, as this way lets you just draw a shape with a tool -- no mask involved.

You can also change the radius of the corners by typing in a different value in the options, again, at the top of the screen under the pulldown menus.

Like this:
http://little-works.com/all_experts/rrectangle2.mov


If you have an existing image and you want to clip it so that it has rounded corners, you can select the rounded rectangle shape, go to the Paths menu and click on the little triangle at the top right of the palette, and select Make Selection. Then select Shift + Command + I to invert your selection (or choose Inverse from the Select pulldown menu) -- in other words, isolate what you've selected with the tool -- then select Cut from the Edit menu. That cuts away everything but your image, which now has rounded corners.

Like this:
http://little-works.com/all_experts/rcorners.mov

Hope this helps!

Lisa