Photoshop Toolbar Primer

That tall stack of icons on the left is Photoshop's toolbar. We'll eventually meet them all. But first let's look at the ones we will work with most. The upper "arrow+" icon is the Move Tool. It can be quickly accessed by hitting the V key. With it, you can drag elements on the active layer around.

NOTE: Hold your mouse over any icon to see its keyboard shortcut. If you see an icon that has a white arrow in one corner, that means that you can single-click/hold the mouse on that icon to see other variations of that tool family. A simple way to cycle through and choose a buried variation of the tool is to use the Shift key with the keyboard shortcut.

Below the Move Tool are three icons on the toolbar involved with defining a specific area (called selecting) of a layer for manipulation or the painting tools. Selction Tools are fundamental to creating within Photoshop. Artists have developed a workflow using a number of Selection Tools as well as other tools on the Toolbar to define extremely accurate selections. It is this ability to carefully isolate their workspace that is arguably Photoshop's strongest point. The topmost one creates selections within rectangular or eliptical shapes. The next one down allows you to draw the shape freehand. The next icon down is the Object Selection Tool. This is a powerful new tool that analyses an image and attempts to isolate individual elements within your selection region.

Below the Selection Tools is the Crop Tool (C) (to trim the artboard) and the Eye Dropper Tool. Below these is a break that separates the Paint Tools - 8 tools used to create, modify, or erase pixels. Basic tools include the Paintbrush (just below the bandaid), the Clone Stamp Tool, the Gradient Tool (box with white-to-black gradation) and the Eraser (just above the Gradient.)

Below the "healing" section (that we'l deal with later in the course) you can find the paintbrush (B).

The T key enables the Text Tool. Below that (P) is the Pen Tool (P) (for Illustrator style bezier drawing), while further down the white arrow tool allows you to edit anchor points within bezier lines.

The Magnifying Glass at the bottom of the toolbar is the Zoom tool. If you are zoomed into an image, use the Hand tool next to it to move around. ***

At the bottom of the toolbar are two large swatches of color. These represent the foreground and background colors. Foregound colors are used by brushes and other painting tools, by default. Background colors will show up when erasing a Background layer and as the background color when creating a new document. They can be reversed by hitting the X key. The default is black: foreground::white:background and can be retrieved by hitting the D key.

*** While zoomed in, holding down the Spacebar on your keyboard will change your cursor temporarily into the Hand. After navigating within the image, release it to restore whatever tool that was previously active.