Saturday School: Rounded Corners

Hi everyone! Hope you all are enjoying the summer and finding lots of extra time for scrapping! Kendall here to bring you the latest installment of "Saturday School." Today we're going to talk about rounded corners. I've been on a big "rounded corner" kick here lately and have been using them a lot in my pages.

Here is one way to achieve the rounded corner look in your LOs without having to rely on templates. I am using PS CS3, but this works in PSE as well. First, locate your "Shapes" tool, and then select "Rounded Rectangle." You can then adjust the radius depending on how rounded you want your corners to be.


Now, start by opening your background paper. Make sure you put the shape on its own layer so that you can later re-size or play with it more if you choose to.


Once you've drawn the shape to your desired size, your screen should look a little something like this:


Now that your shape is in place, open the photo or paper you want to crop into the rounded corner shape. Drag it on top of your rounded corner shape. You can re-size the paper now if you choose to or leave it as it. Now, we want to clip the layers together by pressing Alt - Ctrl -G in PS or Ctrl - G in PSE.


Your screen should now look something like this:


You can merge these layers together, or if you're a bit indecisive like me, you can leave the layers clipped and unmerged in case you decide to make additional changes later. You can now create as many additional shapes as you like; just make sure to put each on its own layer. In my LO, I chose to simply duplicate my rounded corner shape a few times by pressing Ctrl - J.


Make sure that when adding shadows to your clipped shape, you shadow the shape and not the paper or photo clipped to the shape. Once I had all my rounded corner shapes in place, I could continue with my page by adding photos and elements. Here's the finished product:


I hope this tutorial has been useful to you. If you have a LO using Jen's products that features rounded corners, link us up in the comments section of this post. We always love to see what you create!