Making rounded corner frames in Photoshop CS3

I’m writing this tutorial at a request of a reader who wanted to know how to make rounded corner frames in Photoshop CS3 (like all the images I post on my blog). You can go about doing this in many different ways, but I’m going to do it this way as it’s the quickest and easiest to script as it really doesn’t need any drawing or similar.

Step 1

Open up the photo of which you want to make the corners rounded and select all by pressing Command + A (PC: Ctrl + A).

Step 2

Go to Select > Modify > Contract and contract the selection with a reasonable number. The number of pixels will depend on your document size so play around a bit. If you have a document that’s about 800 pixels wide, then a setting of 10px for the contract will work fine.

Step 3

Go again under Select > Modify and to Smooth. This will round the edges of our selection we have. The number to enter again depends on the size of the document and how much rounded corners you’d like. At about 800px a number like 10px will work fine.

Step 4

Now we have a basic rounded corner shape. If you just want to save out the file with rounded corners and not do anything more with it, go to Select > Inverse and then hit delete. You should now have rounded corners against your background.

If you however want to perhaps add a stroke or bring it over to some other document you would want to skip all the above in this step and instead press Commad + J (PC: Ctrl + J) to put what’s in the selection up on its own layer. You can now add any layer styles you want to this and work with the background in any way that you’d like.

Finished Effect

By just adding a drop shadow (at zero distance) to the image I get the result below:

Rounded Corner Frame in Photoshop CS3 - Finished Result