Round cornered images in Paint.NET

I’ve been experimenting with doing some simple image post processing for my posts. Rectangular images with sharp right-angled corners look a bit stark. I’m getting most of the images from iStockphoto (referral link), and it seemed a waste if I didn’t fit photos and text together nicely.

The easiest and fastest way to spruce up a stock photo is to create round corners in the image. I’ll be showing you how to do so in the freely available, fantastic and awesome image editor, Paint.NET (did I mention it was free?).

So, suppose here’s the original photo, after loading it into Paint.NET

Then you add a new layer by either clicking [Layers] -> [Add New Layer] option

or click on the “Add New Layer” button in the “Layers” panel (placed near bottom right by default)

Next, you want to focus on the 2nd layer for some editing first. On the “Layers” panel, uncheck the “Background” image.

On the 2nd layer, we wash it over with white colour first, because by default it’s in “transparent” colour. We can talk about the difference between white and transparent some other time… We’ll use the paint bucket tool

By default, if you haven’t changed the colour selection yet, then the primary colour is black and the secondary colour is white.

What this means is if you click and draw with the left mouse button, black is used. If you click and draw with the right mouse button, white is used.

So after selecting the paint bucket tool, go somewhere in the (transparent-coloured) image, and right-click. This will give you a nice clinical white patch.

We want to draw a rounded black rectangle on this white patch. We use the aptly named “Rounded Rectangle” tool

Some finger nimbleness will be needed here. Our test image is 160 pixels wide and 110 pixels tall. We’ll have to left-click (for black) in the image, at the cursor position of 0,0 and drag-move to cursor position 159,109. You can find out the cursor position by looking somewhere near the bottom of Paint.NET

We’re at cursor position 11,9 in this case.

You should then get this beauty

After that, go the “Layers” panel, and click on properties for the 2nd layer

and set the blending mode to “Additive”

Check the “Background” layer back (to make it visible again) and you should see this

Save and you’re done!

I think a video tutorial would have done a better job. Anyone want to sponsor the Camtasia software for me?

PS. That “Skyline gondola” sign was taken at the halfway point on my practically vertical climb up the hill in Queensland, New Zealand. I was the only one (stupid enough) climbing up. Everyone else was going down… A story for another time perhaps…