Masking images for rounded courses & circles
Overview
Daniel Scott
Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
instructorI discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.
Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.
Alright, this video is the same technique, but a slightly different flavour. We’re going to look at using a clipping mask, but using circles and rounded corners.
Now I’m going to do it for - see down the bottom here is my finished example. I’m going to do it in this white part where I’ve got my teams kind of photographs.
So what I’m going to do is, I’m going to scroll down here, using my space bar. OK, I’m going to zoom in using my command plus.
So I get down the bottom, and I’m going to click hold down the rectangle tool, click and hold it down till I get to the Ellipse tool.
Now the Ellipse tool, if I click and drag it, it’s going to give me kind of and Ellipse that goes anywhere. Now if I hold down the shift key remember, I lock the height and width to a size that I need, and what I’m going to do is turn on my guides, and I’m going to delete that, and I’m going to draw one that spans say 3 columns.
I’m going to hold shift down, and I’m going to get it so it snaps to these 3. I’m going to go to my move tool, and I’m going to move down a little bit. Now it doesn’t really matter what colour it is, because just like we did the last image, it’s going to get covered up by the image. So let’s go to file, and let’s go to Place Embedded. We’re going to grab desktop, we’ll grab Photoshop exercise files, that’s team 1, which is going to be the first one.
We’re going to hit place, OK Now I’m going to move it, so it’s kind of over the top here, and I’m going to hold shift, - scan it down, before I hit enter, jut to get it to a kind of appropriate size. So I’m going to move it in, roughly about there. We can resize it afterwards, and remember here’s our Ellipse and this one is going to be Team Circle 1. OK I’m going to hold down my alt key on a PC, or option on a Mac, and it’s going to join the 2.
Now if you are unhappy with the crop Remember I clicked this one that says Team 1, and I can use my arrow keys, just to tap it around just to get it to where I want. I can transform it using my command T Key, OK I can scale it up, hit enter, and use my keys just to tap it around again. Right, and that’s how you crop to a circle. I’ll quickly do how you crop to rounded corners.
OK If you are using rounded corners, click and hold down the rectangle tool, or the ellipse tool, and there’s one here called rounded corners. Now before you get started pick a radius, - if you are unsure, don’t worry, you can change it afterwards. I’m going to click and drag, ok, and this little box here will allow me to change the radius corners. So I’m going to change the radius corners to say something like 30. OK big massive rounded corners, then I can bring in another image. I can go to file, Place Embedded. I’m going to bring in Team 2. Place it over the top, scale it down, hit enter, and remember holding down the alt key or the option key, depending if you are on a Mac or a PC, and it will crop to the rounded corners rectangle. Alright, that’s how to crop to a circle and a rectangle with rounded corners.