Essential Photoshop Tools: Functions and Applications
Selection Tools
Marquee
Marquee: A tool for square or rectangular selections.
- Setting Elliptical: Allows circular and elliptical selections.
- Setting Single Row: Allows the selection of a row of 1 pixel thick.
- Setting Column One: Allows the selection of a column of 1 pixel thick.
Elliptical Marquee
A tool to create circular or elliptical selections. It is in the same group as the rectangular frame.
Move Tool
This serves to move the contents of the layer you are working. The layer moves completely or only the selected area, if there was a selection set.
Lasso
This tool is used to make freehand selections, clicking on an image area and painting the selection by hand.
Polygonal Lasso
Allows you to make more complex selections, marking the vertices of a polygon. It is also very useful and easy to handle for beginners.
Magnetic Lasso: Makes freehand selections depending on the settings you have set. The selection line is the intersection of two colors depending on the contrast of edges. It works like a magnet.
Magic Wand
This is for quick selections of areas of the same color. Clicking on an image selects the entire area that has the same continuous color.
Editing Tools
Crop Tool
It is a kind of square selection, editable once defined, that serves to crop an image, keeping only the selected area.
Brush
This tool is used to draw freehand on the image. It has several brushes of different shapes and thicknesses and can adjust the hardness of the stroke, among other things. The paint brush works on the active layer.
Pen: The pen is similar to the brush, with the difference that it takes a stroke without smoothing the edges and is completely opaque.
Eraser Tool
Allows you to erase parts of an image and only acts on the selected layer. It has two modes: a pencil mode, which erases all without smoothing, and a brush mode, which erases by blurring the edges. There are various thicknesses for the stroke of the eraser.
Paint Bucket Tool
This tool is used to fill an entire layer with color or a selected area of the layer. Fills with the color selected in the toolbar as the foreground color.
Gradient Tool: This tool creates gradients, functioning like the paint bucket, filling an entire layer or a selected area of a layer, except that the gradient requires drawing a line by clicking and dragging the mouse to define the gradient’s direction and extent.
Horizontal Type Tool
Allows you to enter text into an image. The text can be written in different fonts and sizes and uses the selected foreground color. Associated with this tool (if you click and hold) are other tools, such as for vertical text.
Pen Tool
Allows you to make tracings of any kind, curved or polygonal. The advantage is that you can edit the paths once created and can accommodate any journey needed, no matter how complex. Along with the Pen tool, you need to learn to use other complementary tools that are part of the same group.
Shape Tools
Rectangle
Allows you to make rectangles, which may or may not be color-filled. In the same toolset as the rectangle are other tools to make other types of shapes such as ellipses, lines, or custom shapes.
Line: It is grouped with the rectangle and other shape tools. Use this to draw lines. Lines can have an arrow, customizable, at the beginning and/or end.
Custom Shape
This tool allows you to draw a good variety of art and forms such as flowers, stars, signs, balloons, etc.
Navigation and View Tools
Eyedropper Tool
With the eyedropper, you can select colors from anywhere on the image to set as the foreground color.
Hand Tool
This tool is used to move the canvas. It does not move or adjust any part of the image, but moves the area you’re viewing, if the entire canvas does not fit in the window, either because the image is too big or because you have zoomed.
Zoom Tool
The zoom tool serves to enlarge or reduce the view, but not alter the image. It simply zooms to make it look bigger for more accurate adjustments or zooms out to make the image smaller so you can see it all on your screen.
Specialized Tools
Rubber Stamp
With this tool, you can clone anything. To do so, click on the area you want to clone while holding the alt key, then click on other areas.
Pattern Stamp: Paints part of an image as a pattern.
Dodge and Burn Tool
These tools are techniques in the world of photography and painting. Dodge (overexposure) and burn (underexposure) simulate the effect of excess or short-time exposure of a film to light, giving a feeling of light and dark. The sponge mimics the effects of a cleaning cloth, thus eroding the image.
Sponge Tool
The Sponge tool saturates or desaturates images.
Mask Tool
The mask tool isolates and protects areas of an image. This allows you to apply color changes, filters, or other effects to the rest of the image. When you select part of an image, the selected area is “masked” or protected from editing. Masks are also used for complex image editing, such as gradually applying color or filter effects to an image.