[PHOTOSHOP] Basic Tools Guide [GUIDE]

[kc]

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This is a guide I made to help those of you who are new to Photoshop or just want to familiarise yourselves with the tools in Photoshop. These are not all of the tools in Photoshop but more or less the ones you will be using and the ones you will be unsure about what they mean when you first start using Photoshop. I did not bother to include every tool seeing as some of them are self explanatory.

I found some of these definitions on the internet and edited them so it would be easier to understand, some of them I wrote myself.

If you think that I left any important tools out, please feel free to private message me and I will add it in if I feel it is necessary.

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Brush
The Brush tool is a basic painting tool. It works like a traditional drawing tool by applying the color using strokes.

Paint Bucket
The paint bucket tool allows you to fill in a selected area with a solid colour. Alternatively, you can do the same but with the gradient tool in order to fill a selected area with a gradient.

Pen Tool
Photoshop includes a few versions of the pen tool. The pen tool creates precise paths that can be manipulated using anchor points. This can be useful for isolating an image from its background.

Measuring and Navigation
The eyedropper tool selects a color from an area of the image that is clicked, and samples it for future use.

Selection
Selection tools are used to select all or any part of a picture to perform cut, copy, edit, or retouching.

Cropping
The crop tool can be used to select a particular area of an image and discard the portions outside of the chosen section.

Slicing
The slice tools, like the crop tool, are used in isolating parts of images. The slice tool can be used to divide an image into different sections, and these separate parts can be used as pieces of a web page design once HTML and CSS are applied. The slice select tool allows sliced sections of an image to be adjusted and shifted.

Moving
The move tool can be used to drag the entirety of a single layer or more if they are selected. Alternatively, if area of an image is highlighted with the selection tool, the move tool can be used to manually relocate the selected piece to anywhere on the canvas.

Marquee
The marquee tool can make selections that are single row, single column, rectangular and elliptical. An area that has been selected can be edited without affecting the rest of the image. The selected area will be outlined by dotted lines.

Lasso
The lasso tool is similar to the marquee tool, however, the user can make a custom selection by drawing it freehand. There are three options for the lasso tool – regular, polygonal, and magnetic. The polygonal lasso option will only draw straight lines and the Magnetic lasso tool can detect the edges of an image once the user selects a starting point. Photoshop will complete the selection once the mouse button is released (you may also complete the selection by connecting the end point to the starting point).

Quick Selection and Magic Wand
The quick selection and magic wand tool selects areas based on edges, similarly to the magnetic lasso tool. The difference between this tool and the lasso tool is that there is no starting and ending point, you just select and area.

Zooming In and Out
You can zoom in and out by holding down CTRL and pressing + or -

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Glide​