Paint a dashed line with rounded corners in Photoshop

By Dawn Pedersen · 05/06/2009 ·

Dashed Line

In Illustrator, it’s fairly easy to make a dashed line in which the dashes have rounded corners. In Photoshop, there’s more of a trick to it. I’ll show you how to do both here.

Illustrator Dashed Line with Rounded Corners

Draw a line with the Pen tool.

Draw a line.

Open the Stroke panel (Window > Stroke).
Increase the Weight. I set mine to 10pt.

Increase the Weight.

Click the Dashed Line box to turn your line into a series of dashes.
Experiment with the widths of the Dash and the Gap in between dashes. I set my Dash to 20pt and the Gap to 15pt.

Dash and Gap

To get rounded corners on the dashes, click on the Round Cap icon. This made my dashes too close together, so I changed my Gap to 20pt.

Round Corner

Photoshop Part 1: Create a Custom Brush

Create a new 800px by 600px document with a white background. This file will be used just to create a custom brush.

New Document

Select the Rounded Rectangle tool from the Tools panel.

Rounded Rectangle tool

Set your foreground color to black by pressing D on your keyboard.

Black Foreground Color

Up in the Control panel, make sure that the tool is set to Shape layers.

Shape layers

Set the radius up pretty high. I set mine to 100px. This determines the degree of roundness at the corners. We’re going to draw one very large dash.

Radius of 100px

Draw a single huge dash with the Rounded Rectangle tool, in the middle of your image window.

Single Huge Dash

Press Ctrl+E (Mac: Cmd+E) to merge the shape layer onto the white background.

Merge Down

Edit > Define Brush Preset.

Define Brush Preset

Give your brush a name. You will see that the brush is very large. You get better quality images if you reduce the size of a very large brush, rather than increase the size of a brush that was drawn too small.
Click OK.