MostarNetworks

Here is a quick way of creating ‘rounded edges’ look that is well liked in web design community. You can use this technique to create table or layer backgrounds, tabs, buttons and just about any shape that requires a smooth curve. Photoshop is not the only application that you can use but it sure makes it easy to produce sharp looking design.

1. Gaussian Blur effect

Start of by going to File --> New and create image with dimensions of 300x300px. Now go to your Main Toolbar and choose Rectangular Tool with the foreground color of your choice (here used was black) and create a simple rectangular shape. Then choose Layer --> Flatten Image to do so on our newly created shape/layer.

Next, we will apply Filter --> Blur --> Gausian Blur with the Radius Value of 5.0

2. Adjusting Levels

This gave us a bit much of blur so we need to ‘gain back’ some of it by adjusting Levels.

Go to Layer --> New Adjustment Layer --> Levels and enter values of [110] [1][130]



You can now flatten the image again and save it. Naturally, mine is called ”Rounded Edges.jpg”.



That is it!

Now, having this shape in black color it not really all that exciting. If you used you own color you will notice that it has changed, reason for this being is that we changed the green levels down to value of 1 making it almost non-existent. So let’s use Photoshop for one more minute and decorate our shape....jump over to next tutorial and read Create and Manage Layer Styles.