Creating images with rounded corners with Paint Shop

by

Corel Paintshop Pro X3 doesn’t make it easy to create images with rounded corners, and transparent background. Many methods are slow and laborious. After some playing around, I think I’ve a way to nearly automate the process which after setting up, is two step:

  1. Create a raster rectangle with rounded corners, and make it a selection
  2. Copy your required image, and paste it into the selection

Here’s how.

I’m going to create an image that is 256 x 256 pixels, with a rounded corner of 20 pixels, as a PNG with a transparent background. Once you are familiar with the steps, it takes under 60 seconds to make the basic template, and then seconds to paste an image into it.

Create a raster rectangle with rounded corners

  1. Go to File | New, and create a new image bigger than the one we want, for example width=400 height=400 pixels, with a raster (bitmap) background, and a light gray background colour (this will make it easier to see what we are doing in the next step.
  2. Click the Rectangle too, ensure that Create On Vector is selected, choose white background and foreground colours, and draw a rectangle on your gray background.
  3. Right-click on the rectangle, and choose Edit mode.
  4. Enter your Horizontal and Vertical radius for the corners, ie. 20 pixels each, and then the required width and height, ie. 256 pixels, and click the Apply tick mark.
  5. Make sure you can see the gray background surrounding your white rectangle. If not, select the Pick tool, and move the rectangle so you can.
  6. Click the Magic wand selection tool, make sure that its selection mode is “RGB Value”, the tolerance is low (ie. 0) and feathering is 0.
  7. Click anywhere in the white rectangle. The selection mask should match the outline of the rounded rectangle exactly.
  8. Go to Edit and select Copy, then Edit and Paste as New Image.
  9. Again using the Magic wand, click in the new image to make the rounded rectangle a rounded corner selection.
  10. You now have the required new image, 256 x 256 pixels in size, with rounded corners of radius 20 pixels, and a transparent background.
  11. If you wish, you could save this image in Paintshop format

To make an image with rounded corners

  1. Your image should be approximately square
  2. Select it and copy it
  3. Select the rounded corner template image, go to the Edit menu, and choose Paste into Selection. Since the selection has rounded corners, so will the resulting image.
  4. Select File | Export | PNG optimizer, choose whether you want Palette-Based or 16.7-million (check the Preview), and on the Transparency tab, select Single Color Transparency and Existing Image or Layer Transparency.

To make subsequent images with rounded corners

  1. Go to edit and click Undo, to remove the image that was last pasted into the rounded corner template.
  2. Repeat the copy and paste process described above, to create a new image.