Rounded Corners on a Pre-existing Shape

[wrawrawrawrawra]

I'm trying to take a shape with sharp corners and give them round edges, preferably to a consistent degree. Similar to what the tutorial at http://www.absolutecross.com/tutorials/photoshop/interfaces/round-edges/ is trying to do, only that tutorial doesn't seem to work anymore. I can't realistically recreate the object from scratch using rounded corners but it would look much nicer if the picture did have them. I am using Photoshop x64 CS5 on a Windows 7 computer. Thanks in advance for the help.    

[swashguy]

I would just use the Pen tool and manually make the rounded edges.  Otherwise, start over with the Rounded Rectangle Tool (unless your shape is not rectangular).  Why can't you recreate your existing shape?

[Guest]

wrawrawrawrawra wrote:

I'm trying to take a shape with sharp corners and give them round edges, preferably to a consistent degree. Similar to what the tutorial at http://www.absolutecross.com/tutorials/photoshop/interfaces/round-edge s/ is trying to do, only that tutorial doesn't seem to work anymore.

What do you mean by "doesn't seem to work anymore"?

[wrawrawrawrawra]

Well I tried the steps in the tutorial and it didn't take the blurred shapes back to a sharp view.

[swashguy]

What does your shape look like and is it a vector shape?

[wrawrawrawrawra]

It's not a vector shape and looks like a group of letters (with sharp corners). I'll try to pen tool it later tonight but was hoping for an easy shortcut to just "add" smooth/round corners.

[Aegis_Kleais]

Make sure when using the Shape Tool that you have the mode set properly.  There are 3 modes:

Shape Layers - When you create the shape, it creates a lay filled with a color and a mask in the design of the shape you created.  The object remains vector here so you can use the Direct Select Tool to select its anchor points and move them around (however you cannot modify the round corners after creating them like you can in AI)

Paths - This merely creates a path (you'll see it in the Paths Palette) in the design of the shape you created.

Fill Pixels - This creates a design in the shape you created, but uses pixels to create them.  It is raster information (not vector), so any modification done to it afterwards such as transformations, will result in increased degradation to the quality of the edges.

[Guest]

You are all missing the point .

These are not shapes they are rectangular selections, filled with white, in an Alpha channel which are blurred and then have the edges smoothed with a Levels adjustment and converted back to a selection, where the resulting shape is filled in the layers palette.

If you follow the steps, it works perfectly.

[seomixi]

You can use grid & pentool to create nice rounded rectangle , remember to on snap  to grid .