Affinity Designer - photos - rounding off corners.

[jez]

Hi,

 

in the absence of Affinity Publisher, I'm using Designer to create a brochure and it is going really well so far.

 

The new "Symbol" stuff in 1.5 makes life very easy when changing multiple things at the same time. I could do it quicker in Pages - because I know that inside out - but Pages doesn't have the finesse I require, and learning Designer is worth it.

 

One thing I am stuck on is rounding off corners of images - or pixel layers. I have touched up the pictures in Affinity Photo, dragged the .afphoto files in, dragged them where I want them, done some layer effects etc and they look great. They would look even better with rounded corners.

 

I have searched using Google but I have been unable to find anything - so sorry if this is a duplicate question. I did go looking.

 

Is rounded corners on a picture something I can do in Designer?

 

Thanks,

 

Jez. 

[MEB]

Hi Jez,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

There's no way to round the corners of an embedded document directly but you can use a rounded rectangle as a mask to achieve the same result.

To do it, draw a rounded rectangle with the Rounded Rectangle Tool with the same size as the embedded document. Then drag it over the thumbnail of embedded document layer in the Layers panel to use it as a mask. You should see a small vertical blue bar appearing on the right of the thumbnail when you do this - release the mouse button at that point. Now that the rounded rectangle is being used as a mask, select it clicking on its thumbnail in the Layers panel, make sure the Rounded Rectangle Tool is selected and adjust its properties on the context toolbar. You can also use the small red point on the top left corner of the rounded rectangle (on canvas) to adjust the corner size.

I've attached a sample file below.

rounded_corners.afdesign

[UkeyD]

On 11/2/2016 at 12:36 PM, MEB said:

Hi Jez,

Welcome to Affinity Forums

There's no way to round the corners of an embedded document directly but you can use a rounded rectangle as a mask to achieve the same result.

To do it, draw a rounded rectangle with the Rounded Rectangle Tool with the same size as the embedded document. Then drag it over the thumbnail of embedded document layer in the Layers panel to use it as a mask. You should see a small vertical blue bar appearing on the right of the thumbnail when you do this - release the mouse button at that point. Now that the rounded rectangle is being used as a mask, select it clicking on its thumbnail in the Layers panel, make sure the Rounded Rectangle Tool is selected and adjust its properties on the context toolbar. You can also use the small red point on the top left corner of the rounded rectangle (on canvas) to adjust the corner size.

I've attached a sample file below.

rounded_corners.afdesign 784.1 kB · 42 downloads

This is so useful. Thank you so much! : ) )

[duncang]

Hi, I am trying to do the same thing and managed to get it to work the first time I tried it but I have been unable to do the same thing again in the same document.  It seems that no matter what sequence I try the entire image gets blanked out.  

Also I found that once I asked off the image there was no way to edit the corners - again no matter what I tried to do the small red dot never appears again.

This is incredibly frustrating and has wasted  30 minutes of my time now. Hopefully I am just doing something really stupid so if you have any step by step procedure you could share to make sure it works every time I would appreciate it.

 

Regards

Duncan

[duncang]

OK so I just discovered that if I drop the image over the rounded rectangle text area in the layers panel then it acts as a mask, whereas if I drop it when the vertical bar shows it gets hidden completely.

Is the instruction above out of date?

[carl123]

1 minute ago, duncang said:

if I drop the image over the rounded rectangle

That's a similar way to achieve the same visual effect but the instructions given effectively says...

drop the rectangle over the image's thumbnail