Adobe Photoshop Tutorials, Tips and Tricks

Creating Rounded Smooth Edges

Occasionally there is the need to smooth out hard edges on fonts and graphics or clip art in Photoshop in order to achieve the effect you want. Rather than spend time trying to manually redraw or shape the image by hand, smoothing can instead be handled by Photoshop using only a few quick steps, saving much time. This free Photoshop tutorial provides a quick trick that can be used to achieve this. In the following steps, we'll learn how to go from the image on the left to the one on the right:

Keywords:	smoothing, rounding, edges, text, graphics
Features Used:	gaussian blur, levels

1

We'll start off with a blank canvas using File > New. I chose a white background of this size:

2

To demonstrate the effect, I used a simple graphic and some text. For the graphic, I just drew an arrow using the custom shape tool . Select this tool, then on the toolbar choose the fill pixels option and the arrow from the menu like this:

Then use the mouse to draw an arrow in the upper portion of the canvas like this:

smooth edges

3

Now we'll add a little text to show how the rounded edge trick will affect it. So select the Text Tool , click in the lower third of the canvas and type in some text. We need to work with pixels for this photoshop trick, so convert it using Layer > Rasterize > Type. Then we'll combine these two layers using Layer > Merge Down. The image looks like this right now:

rounded text effect

4

We'll begin the smoothing process now by blurring all the edges. Select Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and use a radius of 5 pixels. Depending on the size of the objects in your image and how much rounding you want, you may need to use either a higher or lower radius value, so feel free to experiment. Here's the result so far:

rounding graphics

5

Finally, we'll smooth out the blur with a contrast adjustment which will leave some nice smooth and rounded edges. We could use Photoshop's contrast adjustment directly, however the Levels adjustment provides better results. So choose Image > Adjustments > Levels or use the keyboard shortcut command-L (control-L on Windows). In the dialog, make these settings:

The way this works is that the blur we applied in Step 4 effectively smoothes out the edges, then the contrast adjustment we did via the Levels dialog increases the image contrast thereby removing the gray pixels around the edges. The edges now have high contrast which makes them crisp and lets the smoothness from the blurring step show. Here's our final result:

smooth edges

Thanks for visiting with the Photoshop Dragon.

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