There are many tutorials for rounded boxes in Photoshop. Photoshop CS includes a rounded box drawing tool even. You can position a rounded box over an image, use the magic wand to select the box, invert selection, select the photo layer, and use edit>cut to round the edges of the photo.
But if you have an arbitrary shape, what do you do? The select menu contains "smooth", which sounds appropriate. Except that the smoothing doesn't work very well at all. The corners come out jaggedy and make any edge effects applied afterwards look terrible. Blurring the corners doesn't help.
The oldest method works best (I've used it since Photoshop 3.0). Create a channel, make a selection, fill it with white, apply gaussian blur (in CS, I sometimes have to convert my shape to a smart shape to apply the gaussian filter), and then apply levels (CTRL-L) set to 130 1.00 165. You can now use magic wand to select the resulting rounded shape. Switch back to the layers list, create a new layer, and fill the selection.
More detailed steps here:
http://www.stockvault.net/tutorials/photoshop_smooth_your_edges.php
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2 comments:
Cool! Very useful. Works in GIMP too!
Searched and searched for some idea on how to do this. Finally found yours and it works perfectly. Thanks so much for sharing!
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