First things first– you need to know what apiece tool in your toolbox does before you try to build something right? You wouldn’t take a screwdriver out and attempt to hammer a nab with it. That’s why the very first thing I’m going to show you is what you’re working with. I’ll start by listing off all of the tools (starting with the upper left and working my way along comic book style.) Along with a brief description of what apiece one is designed to do. I want you to have a good understanding of a very important element of Photoshop. If you want to take your capabilities to the next level, I highly advocate Learn Photoshop in 2 Hours.
^ Lovely, isn’t it? I’ll be explaining apiece tool to you starting from the upper-left one and working my way along apiece row.
Rectangular Marquee Tool: Used for boxing off areas you want to edit. Anything inside the box can be altered, anything outside cannot. In order to make it go away, you hit Ctrl + D (Cmd+D for mac.)
Move Tool: This very simple. No matter what layer you have selected, it will move whatever is on the layer around your canvas.
Lasso Tool: Similar to the Rectangular Marquee Tool, Only your area of selection is based on what you draw around. Think Wonder Woman’s lasso.
Magic Wand Tool: This tiny beauty is perfect for selecting massive areas of similar contrast. If you’ve got a black square surrounded by white, this will automatically choose all the white for you while leaving the black square intact. Likewise if you click the black square the white will be left intact.
Crop Tool: A very simple tool to use. The Crop tool is similar to the rectangular marquee tool in the way it selects areas– but it will in fact omit everything outside of your selection once you’ve chosen your area, and attempt to switch to another tool.
Slice Tool: This tool is most handy when designing a web page. The slice tool can cut perfect lines around a completed product and make apiece area clickable when imported into Dreamweaver.
]]>
Spot Healing Brush: Holding Alt while clicking somewhere on your picture will cause this tool to save the area the brush was hovering over. When you click somewhere else it will paint over your new area with your selected one, and even blend it all in for you! Good for acne removal.
Brush Tool: A individualized favorite. The Brush tool is totally necessary for digital painting, and even can be place to use when editing photos; though it’s primarily for painting. You can open up the brush journalism at the top of the screen to look through the default brushes Photoshop has.
Clone Stamp Tool: Similar to the Spot healing brush. The Clone stamp tool will copy an area and place it elsewhere using the same method as the healing brush, only it won’t blend it for you, it’ll merely “stamp” it down.
History Brush: This tool I seldom use, it will reverse everything you’ve done to one area of the picture. It’s good for resetting something you don’t like when you can’t Ctrl + Z (undo) anymore.
Eraser Tool: Another one of the most commonly utilized tools. The Eraser tool can be great for blending when you turn down its opacity. It also has access to apiece single preset that the brush tool has; I wish real-life erasers worked like this.
Paint Bucket Tool: Fills in one large area with the color of your choice. Personally I think that it does a rather sloppy job of coloring specific areas in. It’s great if you’ve got a transparent background and want a nice solid color though.
Smudge Tool: This tool does just as it states, it smudges. The easiest way to explain this tool is to have you play around with it, smear some things around, it’s great fun.
Dodge Tool: Creates over-exposed areas for a nice “illuminated” look. Be careful with it because the hotspot you use it on will be totally white with too many clicks.
Pen Tool: This is one of the more “complex” tools of PS. I never use this. It’s good for creating and bending lines, but it has a pretty large learning curve to it.
Path Selection Tool: Mostly used for moving around vector-based imagery. You likely won’t be taking advantage of this tool very much.
Rectangle Tool: Makes rectangles! Pretty Self Explanatory.
Notes Tool: Grants the individual to make notes on the canvas, another tool that’s not used very often. But if you play around with this one you might find that you’re fond of it.
Eyedropper Tool: This tool is a god-send. It grants you to click anywhere one your document and grab the exact color from it. Hold down Alt while using the Brush tool grab your color quicker.
Hand Tool: If you’re working on a massive document that encompasses more of Photoshop than you can currently view– the hand tool is perfect for navigating around without zooming out.
Magnifying Glass: An awesome tool that grants you to ascent in on your image. It grants you to simply click for zooming, or choose square-shaped area like the rectangular marquee tool.
Colors: Though they appear in black and white these are your primary and secondary colors. Your primary one determines what color you’re going to paint with the brush tool.
Quick Mask Tool: Paints in a big, blocky area of red. The red area grants you to edit everything inside once you’re done painting it.
Window Mode: Changes Photoshop’s window layout ever so slightly. Click it a few times and see which one you like working in best.
Now that you’ve got an intent of what all your toolbox tools do, you can start building with them! It’s totally essential that you get a feel for these tools, as Photoshop isn’t much superior than MS Paint if you don’t know what you’re doing. I know what it’s like jumping into a program you’ve got no intent about! But eventually all the “newness” wears off and you’ll be perfectly comfortable with what you’re doing, just like driving a automobile or intake a meal, Photoshop will become second nature to you. If you’re really hot to get contented with PS, you should think about checking out www.Learnphotoshopin2hours.com. It really helped me get a large jumpstart on my abilities—I wouldn’t be where I am this day without it!