Okay. This tutorial was requested by some guy at the neopages forums, and I obligingly made it, and thought it'd be useful to post here. It shows you how to round off edges of any shape, and make things look a whole lot more windows XP-like and modern. Very nice.
Difficulty Level - Beginner/Intermediate [Involves channels palette]
Software Requirements - Adobe Photoshop 6 or Higher
| First, get the shape you want to round the edges of. Here, I used an orange square that was on a white background (so you can see it easily).
Ctrl + click the layer to put a selection around it, and go to select > save selection and click ok straight away - do not enter any name or value.
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| This makes a new alpha channel, in the channels palette (surprise!) called Alpha 1. Go into the channels palette and select this channel. Go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and apply a gaussian blur. [Note: The higher the value you input here, the rounder your corners will be.] This should give you something like this:
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| Now, we want to sharpen up that roundness. Hit ctrl + L to bring up the levels dialog box. Move the sliders until you achieve sharpness. Normally, this means moving the black and white sliders towards the middle, as illustrated here. This should give you the result you see to the right.
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| Once you're happy with your sharpness, hit ok. Ctrl + click the channel, or choose make selection from channel (a little dotted ring at the bottom of the channels palette) to put a selection around your shape, in its channel.
With your selection still active, go back to the layers palette and click the layer with the object (that you are rounding) on. Fill it with your desired colour (here orange) hit ctrl + shift + I to invert the selection, and hit backspace to delete the rest of the shape that falls outside the round selection, cleaning it up.
Ta-da! Lovely smooth edges.
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| So, enoy this effect, and hopefully you can use it to make some lovely GUIs of your own. Click here to go to NeoAceFX, and see the banner that I created, using this procedure to round off the edges. Hope you enjoyed this tutorial, if you have any feedback, I'd be happy to hear from you at b3ns0n@msn.com
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