Learning Photoshop Tutorials: - Making Rounded Corners - Making a Seemless Texture - Making Cool Wallpapers Other Program Tutorials: Learning Zbrush Tutorials

Making Rounded Corners
From Free Photoshop CS3 Tutorials by Neticule

Introduction
Making rounded corners in photoshop is pretty darn easy with the use of alphas. You can make a crappy lookin square into a pretty lookin rounded... square... Use it to round corners on anything really! For this tutorial we will make some simple shapes with square corners, and round them out.

Before rounding:

After Rounding:

Step 1: Create a new document First we need to create a new document, open Photoshop and press CTRL+N to open the new document menu. It doesnt really matter what size you make it, just make it large enough to work with, I am using 400x400 pixels with a white background. After you enter the size you want press OK. Note: It also does not really matter what you name the document here, and I suggest the standard resolution of 72 pixels per inch. All of this is really just up to you though.

Step 2: Make a shape on the canvas and fill it with a color First create a new layer by pressing SHIFT+CTRL+N. Now we will just be using the Rectangle Marquee Tool  and the Fill command to make some shapes on the canvas, so press the M key or select the marquee tool from the tools pallete and you can click and drag on the canvas to make a shape, then fill it with a color by going to Edit>Fill or press SHIFT+F5, choose "Color..." from the dropdown menu, pick a color of your choice. After you pick your color click ok and your outline will be filled (you can just use the paintbrush if you want as well). Keep repeating this for as many shapes as you want to draw, just make sure they are on the same layer for now, you select  parts of filled in shapes and press delete on your keyboard to enhance the shapes coolness. Or something...

Rectangle Marquee Tool Edit>Fill or SHIFT+F5 This is the shape I filled!

Step 3: Select everything you have drawn and make it into an alpha channel With your shapes layer selected, hold CTRL down and click again in the shapes layer to select an outline of everything you have drawn on that layer, now click the channels tab right next to the layer tab in the layers panel. At the bottom of the channels window click the tiny icon with the white circle inside the grey box, this will save your selection as a channel. Now click the new channel that was made to activate it, the background should turn from white to black, and everything you selected should turn white. With the marquee tool still selected (Hotkey: M) click somewhere in the canvas to deselect everything, or press CTRL+D.

Channels Tab Save Selection As Channel

Step 4: Blur all of the edges Make sure nothing on the canvas is selected (CTRL+D) and with the Alpha 1 channel active goto Filter>Blur>Guassian Blur. Move the Radius slider until you are comfortable with the amount of roundy-ness the corners achieve, I used a Radius of 10 pixels, dont make it too blurry or the next step may be a bit harder to get perfect results on.

Guassian Blur your Alpha

Step 5: Sharpen the levels The next step is a bit wierd, but it works wonderful. After you have applied your Guassian Blur to your Alpha Channel, goto Image>Adjustments>Levels or press CTRL+L. The window that pops up will show a graph representing the color levls in the image, you dont really need to know how it works, just know that the the black slider on the left, and the white slider on the right are what whill affect the sharpness of the edges. I usually always just start by putting "125" in the first "input levels" box, and "135" in the 3rd "input levels" box, you can see the result right away on your canvas, usually 125/135 works perfect for me, but you may need to play with these number or the sliders to get the perfect level of crispness to your edges. When your happy with how it looks just press OK.

Sharpen the Levels

Step 6: Utilize your new curved alpha If you did the last step correctly, your result should be a shape filled with white, with nice rounded corners. But this shape is still on an alpha channel, we need to put it back on the canvas now, that way you can actually add color and do things with it. First we need to select the outline of the new rounded shape, like in step 3, hold CTRL and click on the "Alpha 1" channel, you should see a marquee outline appear around your shape. Now click back to the layers window by clicking the layers tab, right next to the channels tab. From here you can go ahead and delete your old layer that has the non rounded corners on it, and make a new layer (SHIFT+CTRL+N). You should still have your marquee selection from the Alpha channel, the step here is to fill it with a color by going to Edit>Fill or press SHIFT+F5, choose "Color..." from the dropdown menu, pick a color of your choice and click OK. Now you have a nice rounded corner version of whatever shape you originally made, on its own layer! It may seem like a lengthy process now, but once you do it a few times it should only take 20 seconds or so, its just remembering those steps: Select shape to round > Make alpha channel > Blur it > Level it out > Make the new rounded shape on its own layer. Pretty simple, great for website layouts!

Layers Tab Edit>Fill or SHIFT+F5 This is the final result.

Final Thoughts:
I hope this tutorial helped you out, the same general idea of using alpha channels, blurring, and leveling it also great for antialiasing things (smoothing out jagged edges). So just keep messing around, never stop learning!