How to make a perfect circle picture (no special software needed!)

Anyone can add a picture in the shape of a perfect circle, no special skills, software, packages or subscriptions are needed.

** A few comments on this post have asked how to remove the default white shadow border around your Blogger images. I've posted a super-easy tutorial to solve this problem which you can read by clicking here **

 A few weeks ago I wrote a blog article with this image within it:

 And I had a question on twitter asking me how I made it. So I thought I would share how easy it is, in case there were other people wondering.

I do all of my image edits in Picmonkey. I don't have any special editing software. I'd probably sell my dog for a copy of Photoshop Elements. But in the meantime, Picmonkey does everything I need, totally free. I love it and I recommend it to anyone who doesn't want to splash out on some fancy schmancy software. I made my blog banner with it and I also edit all of my photos - there is pretty much nothing you can't do. Obviously, it's not as sophisticated as Photoshop but it certainly fills a gap in my life :-)

I'm going to share some things I have learnt with it here over a number of posts. If you have any questions or would like to know if something is possible using Picmonkey, I'll give it a bash too, just comment or tweet me.

So, here are the very simple steps to making a perfect circle picture and using it in your blog post/layout.

1. Go to http://www.picmonkey.com. There are two buttons. 'Create A Collage' and Edit An Image'. Click Edit an Image and select the picture you want to use. This technique works on either object or one-person photos best.

2. The first option in the menu on the left is 'Crop'. Click it and a drop-down box with appear. See where it says 'Square' on my screenshot above? When you first go into the menu, that will say 'No Fixed Proportions'. Just click that little box to see the options. This will force you to select a square area of your your photo. You can make the square area bigger or smaller. I made it as big as possible and centered my son's torso.

 3. Now you are ready to make it round. Go to the 'Frames' menu as shown above. You should be able to click any of these photos to make them bigger.

 4. The first option you are given is 'Rounded Corners'. Click it, then slide that slider right the way to the right. Revel in the roundness of your photo.

 5. You must make sure that 'Transparent corners' is checked.

6. Click save (at the top of the screen) and type a name for your file. Make sure you save as a .PNG file or your image won't have transparent corners. Click 'Save Photo' and you will be given the option to chose the file where you want to save the image. 

And you are done! You can now add the photo to your blog in the very same way that you normally add a photo.

 I hope you will enjoy using these types of image, there are lots of ways you can utilise them. Why not make a collage of all round pics? Use Picmonkey's 'Create a collage' option and just upload all round .PNG pictures. Or you could use a circle social media avatar - that would work best with a picture on a dark background, as most social media sites have white as their main colour anyway. I also think round pictures made excellent menu buttons - the possibilities are endless :-) Please let me know if this tutorial was helpful!