Introduction to the Photoshop Toolbar (Part 3)

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Welcome to Photoshop Toolbar Part 3 (Part 3 of 3). In this tutorial we will finish our introduction to the Photoshop Toolbar.

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 it’s 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).

Here’s before:

And here’s after:

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

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. It’s main use (at least for me) it’s to create hair. Let’s say I cut and copy in a document a wolf (or a human head) but I don’t select the hairs very well so it looks fake. Then I use the smudge tool at the edge of the fur to emulate hair.

Here’s before Smudge Tool:

And here’s after:

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.

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 don’t 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 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 don’t 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.

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.

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 won’t 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.

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.

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 won’t work if you don’t 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).

This is where I finish my introduction to the Photoshop Toolbar. I hope you have become more familiar with the different Photoshop Tools and learned some useful stuff.

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Introduction to the Photoshop Toolbar (Part 1)

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In this article (Part 1 of 3) I will give you a quick introduction to the Photoshop CS5 toolbar. The toolbar is a floating panel normally placed at the left of the screen.

In case your workspace looks different choose Window > Workspace > Essentials. In case you moved the floating panels and palettes all around your document and you want them back the way they were simple reset the Workspace by choosing Window > Workspace > Reset “NAME OF THE CURRENT WORKSPACE”.

Similar tools on the toolbar panel are grouped but only one icon is shown. If you want to display all the tools in the group either hold the cursor over a specific tool icon for a longer time or right click the icon in the toolbar.

All tools groups have shortcuts assigned to them. The shortcut is the letter on the right of the tool name.
To access the last used tool in the tool group press the respective key. If you hold Shift while pressing the key you will cycle through all the tools in that group. For example below we have the Spot Healing Brush Tool selected. If I select another tool and then I press J the Spot Healing Brush Tool will be selected again. If I hold Shift and press J the next tool will be selected (the Healing Brush Tool).

Now let’s see what each tool does.

It is used for moving pixels on the screen. You can move text, layer masks, normal layers, selected areas. The shortcut for this tool is V but to temporarily access it while having another tool selected simply hold Ctrl and do the moving. Once you’re done moving release Ctrl and ­you will have the control of your previous tool (the tool you had before pressing Ctrl).

Shortcut – M.

The Rectangular Marquee Tool is used for making rectangular selections and the Elliptical Marquee tool is used for making elliptical selections. If you want to create perfect circles or squares hold Shift while dragging with the respective tool. If you want to move the selection while creating it, hold Space. To add to an existing selection press and hold Shift BEFORE using the tool – you’ll see a little + sign next to the tool cursor. If after you see the + sign next to the cursor you release and press Shift key you will create perfect circles or squares. Holding Alt before dragging will subtract from an existing selection and holding Alt and Shift will intersect with an existing selection. If you’re subtracting from a selection a little minus sign will appear at the right of the tool’s icon and a little X for intersecting.

These little shortcuts for adding, subtracting and intersecting with existing selections apply to almost all selection tools so I won’t be repeating them anymore.

I almost never use the Single Row Marquee tool or the Single Column Marquee Tool but maybe if you’re a web designer you’ll have a use for them. What do they do? If you select one of them and click once on the image you will have a 1px selection row or column.

The Lasso Tool is used for making freehand selections. Not a very precise tool and I almost never use it but beginners may find it attractive.

The Polygonal Lasso tool is a bit more precise, allowing you to create a selections formed by straight lines. It has limited uses for selecting rectangular objects- like benches or fences. If you are using the Lasso Tool you can temporarily access the Polygonal Lasso Tool by holding Alt.

The Magnetic Lasso Tool has the most precision of all the tools in the group. It works by snapping to the edges of the objects. You simply click once on the edge of the object you want to select and release the mouse button. Then carefully drag around the object and notice how the Magnetic Lasso Tool “snaps” to the edges.

You can see below a selection I made with the Magnetic Lasso Tool. It’s the blue umbrella. Not a very bad selection considering the fact that I spent 20 seconds to create it. This is a recommended tool for beginners.

Shortcut-W.

I find myself using the Quick Selection tool quite often despite its imperfections. It has the advantage of being, as the name suggests, quick. Its icon looks like a brush and if you start painting with this brush inside of an object you will quickly select it. It helps a lot if the object has strong edges but even if it has soft edges (like a face against a reddish sky) it still behaves pretty well. Highly recommended for quick work or if you don’t know how to use other tools. Not recommended for precise selections.

The Magic Wand Tool is a nice little tool that has its uses from time to time. If you click somewhere in the image it will select all pixels in that area that have a luminosity level close to the luminosity level of the level you clicked. You can set this by entering a value in the Tolerance box (the Tolerance is situated in the tool option bar along the top of the screen).

In the image below I set the Tolerance setting to 2 and I clicked on the wall. Notice how ragged and ugly my selection is.

After I changed the Tolerance level to 20 and clicked on the same spot on the wall (after deselecting the previous selection) the selection is much better.

Also in the tool option bar is a checkbox that allows you to select noncontiguous areas (areas that are not connected) so if I click again on the same spot on the wall after removing the check from the Contiguous check box I would select both the wall on the left and right and generally every pixel with a close luminosity to the clicked area.

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 you’re 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.

Shortcut – I.

If you’re 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 3×3 or even better 5×5.

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 you’re a web designer) but it has one nice feature. In the options bar there’s a button called Straighten. Here’s 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, we’ve straighten the horizon line. A bit of cropping occurs at the edges but that’s a good trade off for a straight image.

I never use the Note Tool but you may find it helpful if you’re 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 you’re extremely forgetful write notes to yourself, like “Don’t 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 haven’t 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.

That’s it for the Part 1 of Photoshop Toolbar Introduction. Click here to read Part 2.

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Introduction to the Photoshop Toolbar (Part 2)

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Welcome to Photoshop Toolbar Part 2 (Part 2 of 3). In this tutorial we will take a look at the rest of the Photoshop Toolbar and get familiar with the various tools the program has to offer.

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. It’s 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 it’s very useful for seamless blending of skin or other uniform surfaces. Let us say I want to remove the dark bags under the girl’s 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 it’s best that you try it and see for yourself.

You can see my results below. There is a subtle but noticeable difference but that’s 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 don’t 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.

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 layer’s 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.

Let’s draw something with our newly created brush.

Hmm, it doesn’t 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 don’t have a hardness option (in fact you do have a hardness slider but dragging it doesn’t 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 won’t go into detail about how to use it.

The Mixer Brush Tool is Photoshop’s attempt to mimic traditional painting behavior. Again, I don’t use this tool at all but if you’re into traditional painting and you want some digital tools to play with I recommend Corel’s Painter which is built solely for this purpose.

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 you’re 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. That’s 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!

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. Let’s 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 don’t 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.

The Eraser Tool allows you to delete (erase) pixels from a pixel layer (or a layer mask). It is as simple as that. You don’t like the way your new painted layer looks, you select the Eraser Tool and send pixels into oblivion. Alternatively, if you’re 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 it’s 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.

That’s it for the Part 2 of Photoshop Toolbar Introduction. Click here to read Part 3.

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