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The Palette is your single most important point of contact with Adobe Photoshop. Your palette might look slightly different from the picture on the left, depending on your version of the software, but most of it will be very similar or the same.

Step 1 towards becoming a true Photoshop wizard is to master the tools - so here’s a rundown of all of them, what they do, and how they can help you. You’re welcome…

At first, it might look as if the tools palette has 22 tools. Wrong. It has a lot more tools, but several tools might actually be hidden under other tools. Don’t worry, however, because for the most part, it is fairly logical. To access one of the tools “hidden” under other tools, just click on it and hold the mouse button depressed. A selection menu will pop up, allowing you to choose a different tool.

Tip 1: All tools that have a tiny little arrow on the bottom right have more tools hidden under it.

Tip 2 : if you want to select a tool quickly, press the letter corresponding to the tool on your keyboard. This letter is displayed when you hover over the tool. For example: the marquee tool is “M”, and the lasso tool is “L”. if you want another Marquee tool, first press “M” on your keyboard, then press shift+”M”. You will then cycle through the available tools.

Selection tools

1 – The first, and arguably most important, tool is the Marquee tool. With this tool, you make selections in your image, allowing you to change things in small parts of the image, copy, paste, et cetera. Under the Marquee tool, you will find the square marquee, the round marquee and the “single row” marquee.

2 - Your second tool is the Lasso tool. This tool allows you to make non-square and non-round selections – you draw a freehand shape, which turns into a selection when you let go of the mouse button.

Under the lasso tool you will also find the Magnetic lasso tool, which is the same thing as the Lasso tool, but it tries, on its own, to follow the contours of whatever you are trying to select. Very useful on high-contrast pictures.

There is also the polygonal lasso tool, which does the same, except it allows you to make selections of straight lines

More about selection tools

If you want to make a perfectly round selection, you can select the round marquee tool. Then, start to draw a selection, but before you release the mouse button, hold the SHIFT key. This makes sure that the selection gets a 1:1 ratio. The same thing applies to most tools; Tools that draw lines will draw straight lines in increments of 45 degrees, etc.

If you want to add or remove to a selection, there are modifier keys: Hold SHIFT depressed before starting to draw a selection, and the selection are you making is added to the existing selection. The alt key subtracts from the selection.

Image correction tools

4 - The Patch and Healing tools are new tools in Photoshop 7. Both are in location 4, and both are extremely useful for editing out small blemishes in an image.

With the Patch tool, you just select an area which isn’t the way you want it to be (say, a spot on somebody’s face). Then, you pull that selection to an area which is the way you want it to be (a clear patch of skin), and Photoshop automatically copies the corrected patch over the blemish, and corrects colour tone and brightness, while retaining the texture.

The Healing tool does the same as the Patch tool, but it is more of a brush than a selection-based tool, and operates very much like the stamp tool (see Palette button 5)

5 The Clone Stamp tool is extremely useful for editing out larger areas of an image, by replacing it with another part of an image. If you have a person standing on a field of grass, for example, and you would prefer to only have the field of grass, you can select an area of the picture (press alt + mouse button), and then just “paint over” the person. Very effective, but also a tool that takes a little time to master; It is easy to make someone disappear, but it can be difficult to make it look natural.

6 - The Erase tool is a brush which completely removes the content of a layer. This tool is particularly useful when working with multiple layers. However, unless you are using a graphics tablet input device, you will often be better off using a selection instead.

7 - This tool contains the blur, sharpen and smudge tools. They are all useful for blending edges of images. However, as a rule of the thumb, it is better to not have to use these spot editing tools when working with photographs – Selections and soft brushes (brushes that fade towards the edges of the brush size) are likely to give nicer results.

Vector tools

8 - The mouse arrow tool is used when working with paths (often in connection with #9, the Pen tool).

9 - The Pen tool and its sub-tools is used for making vector graphics in Adobe Photoshop. The tool is extremely powerful when you have to make smooth, flowing selections and illustrations. However, when that is said, you are likely to be better off to leave these types of graphics to a illustration package such as Adobe Illustrator or Macromedia Freehand, as these two packages are much more powerful.

Miscellaneous tools

10 - The Notes (and voice annotation) tools are useful if there are several people working on the same image.

11 The hand tool is used for looking around on a page; Instead of using the scroll bars on the right and bottom of the page, with the hand tool, you can “grab” the document and pull it around on your screen, much like you would do with a piece of paper. Useful if you are working zoomed-in on large documents.

Usually, you can temporarily change to the hand tool by pressing and holding your spacebar. Useful when working on an image that is zoomed in - while making adjustments, hold the space bar, move the page, and then let go of the spacebar, getting back to what you were doing.

12 The Move Tool is one of the main tools in Adobe Photoshop. You use this tools to move layers in relation to each other, and to move text around. If you hold the shift key while moving something, it moves in a straight line.

13 The Magic Wand tool is useful for selecting large areas of a document that has a similar colour. If you, for example, were to select all the red in a stop sign, this would be your tool.

14 The Slice tool is useless for photo editing as such; It can be good to have when you are making web pages on which a set of images need to fit together tightly.

15 The Brush tool is just what it says; It can do whatever you expect of a painting tool. Some versions of Photoshop also have an airbrush tool, but from Photoshop 7.0 and onwards, those two tools have been combined into one.

The (air)brush tool can be used for airbrushing out blemishes on somebody’s skin, or for more artistic purposes. Keep in mind, however, that Photoshop is for editing pictures, not for drawing. If you need a lot of paint-type tools, consider Painter instead. If you need precision drawing, use a vector graphics package.

16 The Undo History Brush is an Undo tool; You select a history state from which you need a portion of the image, and when painting on your new image, the “old” version shows up. This has the same effect as selecting parts of an older version of your image, and pasting them over the newer version. It can be good in some creative situations, but I personally never bothered with this tool.

17 The Paint Bucket and Gradient tools are made for filling areas of a picture with a single colour or gradient. The tools are great for making evenly coloured (or gradient) backgrounds

18 The Dodge, burn and sponge tools are interesting tools with brush characteristics; Dodging an image turns it lighter in a part of the image. Burning the image makes the image darker. The sponge tool removes the colour (de-saturates) of an image. They are great for accentuating parts of an image through spot editing.

19 The Text tool is pretty self explanatory, but can be a bit complicated to use. If you need lots of text in an image, use a vector graphics package instead. For less complex text work, the text tool does the job without problems. Note that the text remains actual text when you are done working with it, and it is put in a separate layer. This means that you are able to edit the text later. (Until you rasterise the layer or flatten the image)

20 This square hides all the drawing tools in Photoshop; Squares, lines, circles, etc. However, as this is a tutorial on how to use Photoshop with pictures, the tutorial will not be concerned with the drawing tools all that much.

Measurement tools

21 The Eyedropper tool is a very useful toy; You can use it to select a colour anywhere in your image. When you are working with a tool that outputs colour (brush tools, text tools, etc), holding the ALT key produces an eyedropper tool, so you can re-select a colour.

Under the eyedropper tool, you also find the colour sampler, which does the same thing as the Eyedropper, except it finds the colour average of a larger area. It also contains the Ruler (”Measurements”) tool, which can be useful for finding distances and angles within a picture.

22 The Zoom tool is pretty straightforward. Click in your image to zoom in. Select an area of your picture with the zoom tool to zoom to your selection. Hold ALT and click the zoom tool on your image to zoom out. And if you double click the zoom button itself, it zooms to 100%

23 The Colour selector is not a tool as such, but it is nonetheless very useful. The colour on top is your foreground colour. The colour under is the background colour. The background layer is used when making gradient fills, or when you erase something off your “background” layer.

Do you see those two little arrows on the top right of this tool? Those are for switching the two; Useful when using the eyedropper tool, because the eyedropper selects a new foreground colour.

The little black and white squares on the bottom left reset the colour selector to black foreground and white background. Useful, because it saves you going through the colour selector to find Black or White.

This is the regular selection / Quick mask tool

This tool allows you to select different views of your images: Standard screen, and full screen with or without the menu bar. This is particularly useful when working on huge images where you need every possible scrap of screen space.

This tool takes the whole image into ImageReady - another Adobe programme, which is excellent for finalising photos for web publishing.

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Categories: PC articles | Photoshop | Software
Tags: Adobe

This entry is © Haje Jan Kamps / Photocritic.org, and was posted on Friday, November 24th, 2006. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.