The Toolbox
| The toolbox, like an artist's work table or paint box, holds all the tools you'll use to draw, paint, erase, and otherwise work on your picture. If you've used a previous edition of Photoshop, you might be in for a few surprises . Some of the tools have changed locations, and gained new capabilities, and there are some very nifty new ones. There are four categories of tools in Photoshop's toolbox:
Let's take a quick look at these tools. (We'll talk about them in detail later.) Figure 1.4 shows the toolbox with the tools labeled. Figure 1.4. In the Photoshop toolbox, the tools are grouped by type.
Selection ToolsAt the top of the toolbox is a group of tools called S election tools . They are used to select all or part of a picture. There are three kinds: the Marquees, the Lassos, and the Magic Wand. A selected area is indicated onscreen by a blinking selection border, called a marquee after the movie theater marquee lights that flash on and off. Click and drag the Marquee and Lasso tools over the part of an image you want to select. Figure 1.5 shows the pop-up menus for the Marquee and Lasso Selection tools. Figure 1.5. The Marquee and Lasso Selection tools. The Magic Wand selects by color. You can set the degree of similarity it demands, and just click to select all pixels of that color , or only the adjacent pixels that match. The final tool in this set is the Move tool. After you have made a selection, use the Move tool to move the selected area to another place in the image. Painting ToolsWithin the set of Painting tools are a Brush, Pencil, and Clone Stamp (which works like a rubber stamp). These all apply "paint" to the screen in one way or another, just like the real tools they imitate. The Pencil and Brush can change width and angle. The Pencil tool and Brush tool share a space in the toolbox. There's a button on the Tool Options bar to turn the Brush into an airbrush, and a slider to adjust the paint flow, just like in a real airbrush. The Clone Stamp tool picks up and copies a brush-shaped piece of the background and "stamps" it wherever you click. There are also various erasers that, as you might expect, take away part of the picture. You can use a Block Eraser, or erase with any of the Brush shapes . There are two special-purpose erasers: the Background and Magic Erasers. Use them to automatically erase a background or selected color. Four special retouching tools are part of the Painting set: the Healing Brush (which looks like a Band-Aid), the Spot Healing Brush (a Band-Aid overlapping a round selection), the Patch (which looks as if it belongs on the knees of my blue jeans ), and the Red Eye tool (a single-function tool introduced in Photoshop CS1). The Spot Healing Brush and regular Healing Brush tools are better than the Clone Stamp for retouching small areas on a picture because they work only on the spot, wrinkle, or scar you want to remove without affecting the surrounding area. The Patch covers a larger area, and its results blend evenly into the background. The Red Eye tool is essential for fixing eye color (red eye in photos of people and green eye in photos of animals). The History Brush is a very useful tool that, combined with the History palette, gives you the capability to selectively undo and redo as many of your changes or individual brush strokes as you want. The Art History Brush imitates different painting styles. The Gradient tool lets you create backgrounds that shade from one color to another, or even all the way through the rainbow. The Paint Bucket, which shares space with the Gradient tool, pours paint (the foreground color) into any area you select. Finally, there are tools that move, blur, and change the intensity of the image. These are the Blur/Sharpen/Smudge tool and the Dodge/Burn/Sponge tool. The second and third options of each set are found on pop-up menus. These tools are covered in detail in Hour 7, "Paintbrushes and Art Tools," Hour 8, "Digital Painting," and Hour 9, "Moving Paint." Path, Type, and Shape ToolsThese tools aren't as easy to classify as the Painting tools or the Selection tools. They do different, useful things. The letter T represents the Type tool, which puts type on your picture. The Path tools, represented by a pen icon, draw paths, which are a means of drawing a line or shape. After you have drawn a line or shape, you can use the tools to select a portion of your path and reshape it. Path tools can be used as both Selection tools and as Painting tools. In Hour 13, "Paths," you learn how to work with all of the Path tools. The Shape tools can draw both filled and unfilled shapes, including rectangles, ellipses, polygons, and custom shapes. The Line tool is also part of this set. It draws straight lines which, when you hold down the Shift key, can be constrained to 45- or 90-degree angles, just as if you had used an artist's or architect's T-square and triangle. Figure 1.6 shows the Shape tools and some of the custom shapes. Figure 1.6. You can create your own custom shapes, too. The Notes tool works like the yellow stickies it resembles. Use it to place notes on your documents while you're working on them. The note can go either on the canvas, or in the area adjacent to it. You can even use voice annotations, if your computer has a microphone plugged in. The notes are invisible when you print the image. Viewing ToolsThere are two Viewing tools: the Hand tool and the Zoom tool. The Zoom tool is shaped like an old-fashioned magnifying glass, and the Hand, not surprisingly, like a hand. The Zoom tool lets you zoom in by clicking the tool on the canvas to see a magnified view of your picture, or zoom out by pressing Option (Mac) or Alt (Windows) as you click the image. You can also click and drag the Zoom tool to enlarge a specific part of the image. When you zoom in, the picture is usually too big to see all at once. The Hand moves it within the window and is helpful after you use the Zoom tool to enlarge the picture. Use the Hand, as shown in Figure 1.7, to slide the part of the picture you want to see or work on into a convenient spot. You will also use it to slide objects or type on layers, but we'll get to that later on, in Hour 11, " Layers ." Figure 1.7. The Hand moves an image within its window. You can use the Hand either on the main screen or, as seen here, in the Navigator window. Within this category, we can also include the Eyedropper tool, the Color Sampler tool, and the Measure tool. The Eyedropper tool picks up a sample of any color on which you click, making it the active color, so you can paint with it. The Color Sampler tool places a reference point on the screen when you click, and puts all of the color information about that spot in the Info palette. You can keep information on as many as four samples at a time. The Measure tool can be used to measure dimensions and angles in the picture. Click and drag a line to measure a distance between two points, and see it displayed in the Info window. To measure an angle, first create a measured line. Then place your cursor on one of its two endpoints. Hold down the Option (Mac) or Alt (Windows) key while clicking and dragging from the endpoint of the first line in the direction of the angle. Tool ShortcutsEvery one of these tools can be selected by clicking its icon in the toolbox, but Photoshop gives you another, even easier way to access the tools. Instead of clicking the tools you want to use, you can type a single letter shortcut to select each tool. To toggle through the available tools where there are pop-up menus, press Shift plus the shortcut letter until you reach the tool you want. Table 1.1 lists the tools with their shortcuts. Dog-ear this page so that you can refer to the table until you have memorized the shortcuts. Table 1.1. Tools and Their Shortcuts
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