Crop Tool, Slice Tool and Slice Select Tool

The Crop Tool allows you to crop your images to the desired size. Click, drag, press Enter and
you just cropped your image. The cropping is best done at the end of the editing process.
The Slice Tool and Slice Select Tool are mainly for Web Designers and have very few uses for
regular uses. How it works? Well, you drag with the Slice Tool and create rectangles (usually
web pages layouts). After youre done you select Save for Web & Devices from the File menu
and select a folder. This process will save each sliced portion as a separate image thus allowing
you to quickly use these images for website creation.

Eyedropper Tool, Color Sampler Tool, Ruler Tool, Note Tool, 123 Count Tool
Shortcut I.
If youre doing color correction in an image then the Eyedropper Tool is your best friend. To use
it properly first set the Sample Size in the option bar (the option bar I keep talking about is
situated just below the Menus) to 33 or even better 55.

Hover the Eyedropper tool over the image and notice how the R G B values change. If you click
with this tool anywhere on the image you will set the Foreground color to the color below the
Eyedropper Cursor. A quick way to access the Eyedropper tool while having the Brush Tool
selected it is to press the Alt key.
Hold Shift and left click while using the Eyedropper tool to access the Color Sampler Tool and
create a new color sampler (you can have a maximum of 4 color samplers). You can see in the
image below where my color sampler is and what are the R G B values in the area I have
sampled from. This information is very useful when you do color correction or you want to know
what are the values of a specific area. Even better, you can change the Mode to Lab, CMYK,
HSB or other wacky modes. I remember that I used this tool a lot when I was first learning about
Photoshop to see how various adjustments and blend modes affect the pixels values.

The Ruler Tool is for measuring the actual dimensions on the screen. Not a lot of uses for this
tool (maybe if youre a web designer) but it has one nice feature. In the options bar theres a
button called Straighten. Heres how to use it. Notice that in the picture below, the level of the
ground is not horizontal. It looks like the house is falling to the left side.

To correct this, select the Ruler Tool then click and drag where the horizon line is in the picture

Press Straighten and voila, weve straighten the horizon line. A bit of cropping occurs at the
edges but thats a good trade off for a straight image.

I never use the Note Tool but you may find it helpful if youre passing documents to other people
and you want to indicate something. In the image below I added several notes and each could
indicate a specific problem you want someone to address or maybe if youre extremely forgetful
write notes to yourself, like Dont forget to reduce the saturation here or Remove this ugly
spot here.

Finally, the 123 Count tool is for counting objects. It probably has its uses for certain people but
I havent ever felt the need to count objects in an image with a tool.
NOTE: The original house picture was straight to start with, but for the purposes of the tutorial I
rotated the picture slightly to the left and then used the Ruler Tool on it.

Spot Healing Brush Tool, Healing Brush Tool, Patch Tool, Red Eye Tool
These tools are very important if you are doing a lot of facial retouching. The Spot Healing
Brush Tool is the easiest to use. You simply find the skin imperfection you want to remove and
click on it. Its not the most advanced technique for making clean skin but it is a basic and very
fast tool.

You can see in the image below a before and after. I simply clicked the marked spots with the
Spot Healing Brush Tool and Photoshop created some good skin based on the clicked spot and
the surrounding area.

The Healing Brush Tool is the same as the Spot Healing Brush Tool with the difference that it
requires you to set a sample point so that Photoshop will base its healing algorithm on the area of
the picture set as the sample point. To put it more simply: you will heal all your next spots based
on the area you Alt-clicked on.

The Patch Tool is a different beast from the first two and its very useful for seamless blending
of skin or other uniform surfaces. Let us say I want to remove the dark bags under the girls eyes.
I could use the Spot healing Brush Tool but the Patch Tool offers an easier way. In the image
below I selected the Patch Tool and created a selection as shown below. Now simply drag the
selection a bit lower three times and release. This will create skin in the selected area based on
the area from which we drag the selection. The whole process is easier done than said so its best
that you try it and see for yourself.

You can see my results below. There is a subtle but noticeable difference but thats what you will
probably want when doing portrait retouching with Photoshop. On the other hand, let us say that
you used the Spot Healing Brush Tool like crazy some parts look fake and dont fit with the rest

of the face. No problem. Select the troublesome area with the patch tool and drag and drop the
selection a couple times in the surrounding good portions of the skin. There, problem solved.
Again, these things are much more complicated to write than to do.

Finally, the Red Eye Tool requires you to select an iris with a red eye problem and it attempts to
remove the redness in the pupil. Although there are more advanced ways to do that (with Curves
or Channels) this tool does a pretty good job.

Brush Tool, Pencil Tool, Color Replacement Tool, Mixer Brush Tool

The Brush tool is probably the most used tool in the Toolbar panel. You can use it to paint with
pixels over your image. The round brush tool is the one selected by default when you first open
Photoshop so you probably have played with it a little. This brush has two important settings you
will want to play with: size and hardness. Hardness represents how defined the edges of the
brush are (or how blurry). Set the hardness setting to maximum (100%) and you will paint with
ugly hard strokes.

Set it to minimum and you will have some nice blurry strokes that blend well with the
background.

In the brush option panel (usually you can find the option panel in the upper area, just below the
menu bar) you can also change the blending mode of the brush. Combined with the layers

blending mode this option offers you some wildly creative options. A useful keyboard shortcut
for the brush tool are the bracket keys ([ / ]). Clicking the left bracket key decreases the size of
the brush while the right bracket key increases the size. Holding Shift while pressing the bracket
keys allows you to increase/decrease the hardness of the brush.

The round brush tool is not the only tool available: Photoshop offers you a wide range of
different shaped brush for your needs.

Still not enough brushes? No problem. You can create your own brushes. Create a new layer,
draw something with a black brush then choose Edit > Define Brush Preset.

Give it a name and you have a new brush.

Lets draw something with our newly created brush.

Hmm, it doesnt look so good. If only we had some kind of advanced settings for the
brush.Oh, wait! We do! Choose Window > Brush to open the brush panel and enjoy the
multitude of settings for your newly created brush. We can add texture over our brush, make it

rotate randomly, make it scatter, add another brush on top of it and many other things. Go ahead,
open the brush panel and play with the settings. You can create some pretty cool brushes with it.

The Pencil Tool is basically a downgraded version of the Brush tool. You dont have a hardness
option (in fact you do have a hardness slider but dragging it doesnt change a thing) but you have
almost all of the features of the Brush Tool. You will probably be interested in the Pencil Tool if
you do pixel art.
The Color Replacement Tool allows you to replace one color with another. It has a bunch of
settings in the Options panel and it offers some interesting results but to be honest I almost never
use it. There are better, more accurate ways to replace some colors with other colors (at least for
me) so I wont go into detail about how to use it.
The Mixer Brush Tool is Photoshops attempt to mimic traditional painting behavior. Again, I
dont use this tool at all but if youre into traditional painting and you want some digital tools to
play with I recommend Corels Painter which is built solely for this purpose.

Clone Stamp Tool, Pattern Stamp Tool

The Clone Stamp Tool is probably my favorite tool and surely the one I have most fun with (and
Filter > Liquify too). It has a lot of uses and if youre doing photo manipulations then this a tool
to be on good terms with. It is not complicated at all. To use it first Alt-click somewhere to set
the sample point. Then start painting. You will notice that you will paint with the pixels
underneath the sampled area. Thats all this tool does. It clones areas from one part of the image
in other parts. It is very useful for creating new content based on an existing one and removing
skin imperfections or undesired objects.
The Pattern Stamp Tool allows you to paint with desired patterns over an image. Never had a use
for it!

History Brush Tool, Art History Brush Tool

The History Brush Tool is an interesting little thing that holds a lot of power. It allows you to
paint on a new layer from a previous state of your image. Lets say that you heavily modified a
photo but you still want some of the original look in certain areas. To do this first select a
previous state. Open Window > History and click on one of the little squares next to the name of
the desired state. In the image below notice that I clicked on the little box next to the most upper
state of the image the original. Now if I create a new layer and paint with the history Brush
Tool I can restore certain areas of my picture to their original state.

Personally I find it a very powerful tool but my workflow is based on adjustment layers and
nondestructive editing so I dont find the need for the History Brush Tool. It was a very popular
tool back in the day when the nondestructive editing capabilities of Photoshop were scarce.
The Art History Brush Tool is a strange tool that allows you to paint from previous states of the
images but in crazy, dynamically changing shapes. A quite useless little tool, if you ask me.

Eraser Tool, Background Eraser Tool, Magic Eraser Tool

The Eraser Tool allows you to delete (erase) pixels from a pixel layer (or a layer mask). It is as
simple as that. You dont like the way your new painted layer looks, you select the Eraser Tool
and send pixels into oblivion. Alternatively, if youre smart you could use a layer mask and
nondestructively remove the undesired pixels. Maybe you noticed that I generously used the term
nondestructive but I do this for good reason. When working on a document in Photoshop its
very important to be able to go back and redo or modify some of your old actions. This offers
you the power to infinitely tinker with settings and adjustments without losing any permanent
data. That is why I recommend staying away from the Eraser Tool as much as possible and go
for layer masks instead. A bit trickier to understand at first but they are totally worth the effort.

The Background Eraser Tool is like the Color Replacement Tool , but instead of replacing the
color you erase it. It is a decent tool for getting rid of certain parts of the image but not precise
enough. There are much better selection tools and techniques (like Channels and Color Range)
that I do not use this tool very often.
The Magic Eraser Tool looks and acts a lot like the Magic Wand Tool but instead of selecting
pixels it deletes them. Useful tool only if you are in a great hurry and do not care much about the
results.

Gradient Tool, Paint Bucket Tool

First, let us cover the Paint Bucket Tool. It is a useless tool as far as I am concerned because I
never used it. And I mean never ever. What does it do? Well, if you click with it on a picture it
will fill the area with the foreground color. It has a Tolerance setting in the options panel which
works the same way as the Tolerance setting for the Magic Wand Tool.

Now the Gradient Tool is a very useful tool and I find myself using it on a daily basis. It allows
you to create a gradient from the background and foreground colors. The shortcut key is G.
While you can achieve some artistic effects by dragging the gradient tool directly on a layer and
then maybe use Fade (Ctrl + Shift + F) and an Opacity option its more likely that you will want
to use it in layer masks. You want to create a Vignette effect? Add a Curves Adjustment Layer,
drag the curve downwards to darken and in the layer mask drag with the Radial Gradient Tool
(black as foreground, white as background).
Heres before:

And heres after:

This may not be the best looking Vignette effect (theres more than one way to achieve this
effect) but it serves its demonstrative purposes.

Blur Tool, Sharpen Tool, Smudge Tool

The Blur Tool and the Sharpen tool have some obvious purposes: they blur and respectively
sharpen. They have 2 big disadvantages though. Firstly, they are pretty processor intensive, so if
you like working fast or you have a slow machine you will have to wait. Secondly, using them
means that you are not editing your document in a non-destructive way. If you want to go back
to a previous look of your image then you will have to hit Ctrl + Z (Undo) like crazy. When it
comes to sharpening and blurring I prefer to create composite layer from all the visible layers
(Ctrl + Shift + Alt + E), apply a sharpen/blur filter on this layer, add a layer mask and paint it
with black and white to show/hide my layer (in a layer mask black conceals and white reveals).
The Smudge Tool allows you to smudge pixels. Its main use (at least for me) its to create
hair. Lets say I cut and copy in a document a wolf (or a human head) but I dont select the hairs
very well so it looks fake. Then I use the smudge tool at the edge of the fur to emulate hair.
Heres before Smudge Tool:

And heres after:

Dodge Tool ,Burn Tool , Sponge Tool

Now these are pretty good tools. Dodge Tool lightens and Burn Tool darkens while in the same
time increasing contrast. In the Options Panel there are 2 setting you should be aware of:
Exposure setting and Protect Tones checkbox. You will want to have the Protect Tones checkbox
checked all the time unless you are aiming for very strong effects. The Exposure setting affects
the power of the tool .I recommend using lower settings and gradually paint until you achieve the
desired effect. A quick tip: If you are using the Dodge Tool hold Alt to temporarily switch to
Burn Tool and vice versa.
The nondestructive alternative to these 2 tools is to create a new layer, fill it with 50% Gray
color (Shift + F5), set the blend mode to Overlay and use Dodge and Burn or a black and white
brush on the layer to achieve similar effects.
The Sponge Tool desaturates the image (absorbs color). For a more contrasty effect be sure to
check the Vibrance checkbox in the Options Panel.

Pen Tool, Freeform Pen Tool, Add Anchor Point Tool, Delete Anchor Point Tool,
Convert Point Tool

The Pen Tool may be familiar to you if you have worked with Adobe Illustrator. This tool allows
you to create vector shapes and the additional tools in the category allow you to modify and
tweak that shape. I dont do much vector work but instead I use this tool heavily for my
selections. Basically I trace with the pen tool the object I want selected and then I simply
transform path to selection (Ctrl + Enter). This allows me to do very accurate selections, it works
especially well when the object I want to select has a color similar to the background, and the
usual selection techniques will not work. So go ahead, give it a spin and create some paths. Make
sure to check Rubber Band in the Options Panel as it allows you to preview the paths you are
going to create.

Horizontal Type Tool, Vertical Type Tool, Horizontal Type Mask Tool, Vertical
Type Mask Tool

Horizontal and Vertical Type tools allow you to add text to your images. Simply click anywhere
in your document with one of these two tools and start typing. You can change the font, size and
other settings in the Options Panel. When you are done typing simply press Ctrl + Enter to close
the paragraph and stop typing. If you click and drag with one of these two tools you will create a
box which will allow you to type only inside that box.

If you want to type on a path for a special effect simply create a path with the Pen Tool and with
Vertical or Horizontal Type Tool click somewhere on the path (you will notice that the icon will
change).

Horizontal and Vertical Type Mask tools allow you to create a selection from type. That is if you
type something with one of these tools and press Ctrl + Enter you will have a selection of your
typed text. I dont use these tools at all because I can get a selection from a type layer much
easier: I simply Ctrl-click on the layer and voila, a selection of the visible pixels of that layer.

Path Selection Tool, Direct Selection Tool

These tools are designed to manipulate and select paths. If you click with the Path Selection Tool
on a path you will select the entire path and if you click with the Direct Selection Tool on a path
you will select only a point or a handle bar.

Rectangle Tool, Rounded Rectangle Tool, Ellipse Tool, Polygon Tool, Line Tool,
Custom Shape Tool
These tools allow us to create different shapes. There are three options in the Options Panel
which are very important. If you select the first option you will create Shape Layers (that is
basically a Solid Color Adjustment layer with a Vector Mask), the second option allows you to
create simple Paths and the third option allows you to create pixel shapes.

You can see in the image below some different shapes I created:

I wont cover the 3D tools but know that they allow you to manipulate 3D objects that you create
in Photoshop or import from other 3D software.

Hand Tool, Rotate View Tool

If you are zoomed into a document the Hand Tool allows you to drag the document. Simply click
and drag and you will see what I am talking about. You can temporarily access the Hand Tool
from almost any other tool by simply holding the Space button.

Zoom Tool

The Zoom Tool allows you to zoom into a document. Drag to the left to zoom out or drag to the
right to zoom in. Click to zoom in, Alt-click to zoom out. You can temporarily access the Zoom
Tool from almost any tool by holing Alt + Space. Note that certain features of the Zoom Tool
and the Hand Tool wont work if you dont have Enable OpenGL Drawing checked in the Edit >
Preferences Performance tab.

There are some additional buttons on the Toolbar Panel which are not Tools.
Default Foreground And Background Color (Shortcut D) allows you to set black as foreground
color and white as background.

Switch Foreground and Background Color (Shortcut X) allows you to switch between
foreground and background colors.

Set Foreground and Set Background Color. If you click on one of these icons the Color Picker
window will pop up allowing you to select a color. A nice feature of Photoshop CS5 is that when
you have the Brush Tool selected you can temporarily access a simplified version of the Color
Picker window (also called HUD Color Picker) by holding Shift + Alt and Right-clicking. You
can change some options for the Color Picker appearance by going to Edit > Preferences >
General.

Finally the Quick Mask (or Edit In Quick Mask Mode) (Shortcut Q) allows you to quickly select
parts of your document.

Simply click Q to enter Quick Mask mode and use the Gradient Tool or the Brush Tool to draw
with red color. When you press Q again to exit the Quick Mask mode the red color becomes a
selection. Note that the default behavior in Photoshop is that red is the non-selected area and the
rest of the image is selected. If you want the red to be the selection (I find it much easier to work
this way) simply double click the Quick Mask icon and select Selected Areas in the window that
pops up. In that window you can also change the color and the opacity of your Quick Mask.

In the image below I used the Gradient Tool in the Quick Mask Mode to select the upper portion
of the image.

After I press Q again the red color becomes a selection.

Now I can apply different adjustments to this selection (quickly).