Okay, I need forgiveness from you for being absent again for quite a number of days. I promise to get a freebie up here in the next 24 hours. Life has been crazy hectic again, but FUN FUN FUN this time around! (Well, the other projects were fun, but I was itching to do digital scrapbooking, which is my P.A.S.S.I.O.N… and now my projects basically center around this, so… I’m having fun swimming around in things to do! 😆

Just passing by quickly, before I start working on more freebs for you (Fall / Halloween / Sistah… which one first???), to share something so wonderful! I was flipping through one of my old issues of Digital Scrapbooking magazine (which I totally loooove, along with Creating Keepsakes, that mother of all scrapbooking mags, and Simple Scrapbooks, which is my absolute fab go-to for inspiration and my personal no. 1 mag simply because it totally fits my style of scrapping)… I’m digressing here…

Anyway, so I was flipping through the mag while waiting for my son to be dismissed from his class, and I discovered in one of its pages a fantabulous way to get rounded corners on a photo!!!! WOOHOO!!! (Is there anyone in the house who doesn’t do digital scrapbooking? If you haven’t tried it out yet, let me just tell you, you NEED to discover this passion in you and you’ll cross over to the Dark Side quite quickly! heheheh… not to mention the community is the BEST I’ve ever seen on the worldwide web in my entire life!!!! Many of my best friends I met at Jessica’s playground!!!)… ah, but again I digress.

On to this serendipitous discovery I made in the pages of the mag. Here’s how to do it (oh, and it works for both Photoshop full versions and PSE!)

1. Start off with the photo you want to use. Do all the adjustments and tweaking that you want to do with it. (And always work with a duplicate of that photo, or save it under a different filename so that you don’t write over the original).

2. Select the Custom Shapes tool from the toolbar on the left (in PSE5, which I use, it’s the 20th from the top… or you can just hit the U-key and get it instantly. 😉

3. In the options menu of the Custom Shape tool at the top of your workspace, use the dropdown triangle beside “Shape” to choose the rounded rectangle shape. If it’s not immediately there, click on the tiny triangle on the right side to bring out the flyout menu, and click on Shapes. That will bring up the menu of shapes under Custom Shape tool and you can find the rounded rectangle shape there. Select it.

4. Next, click on the dropdown triangle of the icon that looks like a speech bubble (to the left of the “Shape” also on the options toolbar) and choose Fixed Size and enter the width and size of your photo. If you don’t know what the width and height of your photo is exactly, just make sure that when you draw out your custom shape, you are able to eyeball it so that it fits your photo size as closely as it can.

5. One more thing to do: Also on the options menu, in the box that says Radius, change the corner pixel size of your rounded rectangle to a value below 1pixel. The magazine recommends 0.25px.

6. Hold down CTRL and click on the rectangle layer so that you can select the rounded rectangle. Then up on the main menu, go to SELECT > INVERSE (or simply type in SHIFT-CTRL-I) and voila! That deletes the corners, leaving you with nice rounded corners!!!

Isn’t that amaaaaazing??? Just wanted to share with you the happiness of discovery! Spread the digi love, people! 😆

Now back to work! See you in a bit! 🙂