Tools and Their Functions
Tool Name Function
1 Move Tool Lets you cut and drag a pixel section to a new location in the photo. You can also use the tool to move or copy selections between photos and between photos in other applications.
2 Zoom Tool Select the zoom tool to zoom in or out of your image.
3 Hand Tool In standard edit or quick fix the hand tool, the zoom tools, the zoom commands, and the navigator pallet lets you view different areas of an image at different magnifications.
4 Eye Dropper Makes it easy to copy a colour without having to select a swatch it copies, or samples, the colour of an area in your photo to set a new foreground or background colour. You can sample from an active image, from another open image or from your computers desktop.
5 Marquee Rectangular and Elliptical marking tool. The rectangular marquee tool draws squares or rectangular section borders and the elliptical marquee draws round or elliptical section borders. Use this tool to select specific areas of your image to copy or isolate. You will use this tool often.
6 Lasso Magnetic Lasso tool draws a section border that automatically snaps to edges of objects you drag over in the photo. This makes it easy to draw precise section borders. The magnetic lasso tool is useful for quickly selecting object with complex edges set against high contrast backgrounds
7 Magic Wand Selects pixels within a similar colour range with one click. You specify the colour range or tolerance for the magic wand tool’s selection. Use the magic wand tool when you have an area of similar colour, like the blue sky. By holding down the shift key and clicking in new areas you will be able to select additional areas of your image with the magic wand.
8 Selection Brush Tool Makes selections two ways: you can paint over an area you want to select in selection mode, or you can paint over areas you don’t want to select using a semi-opaque overlay in mask mode. You can first make a rough selection with a marquee tool, magic select brush or other selection tool, and then fine- tune your selection with the selection brush tool. You can add to the selection using the selection brush tool in the selection mode, or subtract from it in mask mode.
9 Text Adds text to your image. Click anywhere in the image to type your text. You can resize or change the fonts by making the changes in the options bar. Text can be moved by using the move tool.
10 Crop Tool Removes the part of the image surrounding the crop marquee or selection. Cropping is useful when you want to remove background elements or to focus in on the subject of your image. Remember to set your size and resolution in the options bar.
11 Cookie Cutter Crops an image into a shape that you choose. Drag the shape across your image, move and resize the shape by using the bounding box until you have the area that you want.
12 Straightening Straightens horizons draw a line across the image, choose the option to rotate all layers and then choose an option from the canvas option menu – grow canvas to fit or crop to remove background or crop to original size.
13 Red-Eye Removal Removes red-eye by clicking on the effected area of the eye. Remember to zoom in as close as possible to the eye to avoid errors during the process.
14 Healing Brush Fixes imperfections in your image.
15 Clone Tool Use to remove large areas from your image by copying areas from one section to another.
16 Eraser Changes pixels in the image as you drag through them by erasing them. If you have the ability to use “Layer Masks” please use this option over erasing.
17 Brush Tool Use to simulate airbrush techniques.
18 Paint Bucket Use to fill an area that is singular in colour value to the colour that you choose.
19 Gradient Fill an area with a gradient by dragging in the image or selection of an image with the gradient tool. The distance between the starting point, where you press and hold the mouse button, and the ending point, where you release the mouse button, affects the gradient appearance as does the gradient type
20 Custom Shape Provides many different shape options for you to draw. When you select the tool you can access the shapes in the option bar. Click and drag the shape tool across the screen to draw the shape, you can also resize the shape by dragging the bounding box.
21 Smudge tool Simulates the actions of dragging a finger through wet paint. It picks up colour where the stroke begins and pushes it in the direction that you drag the mouse. You can smudge existing colours in your image or smear foreground colour on your image.
21 Sharpen Tool Use this tool after you apply the Unsharp Mask if certain areas of your image could use a little extra tweaking.
21 Blur Tool Softens hard edges or areas in an image to reduce the detail. Use the blur tool on small areas of your images or to tweak small areas of your image. Should your image require large sections to be blurred, it is better to use a blur filter.
22 Sponge Tool Changes the colour, saturation or vividness of an area. In grayscale mode the tool increases or decreases contrast. Again this is for fine-tuning small areas of your image.
23 Colour Pallet Lets you select and hold two colours for use with the paint bucket, gradient, brush tool. By double clicking on either of the boxes you will be brought to the colour swatch where you can choose from thousands of colours.
Layer Pallet Icons
Tool Name Function
1 Blending Modes Allows various options for setting blending modes for layers. For example you can lighten your image by duplicating your image and then changing the blending mode to screen.
2 Opacity Changes the opacity level of images allowing you to soften effects
3 New Layer Creates a new “blank layer”
4 Adjustment Layer Shortcut to levels, brightness/contrast, hue/saturation, gradient map, photo filter options
5 Garbage Can Deletes layers that are dragged into it
6 Link Layers Link layers so that editing done to on layer will be applied to the layers that
are linked to it
7 Lock Locks an image layer so that changes cannot be made to it
8 Visibility If you can see the “eye ball” then the layer is visible and edited. If you cannot see the “eye ball” then the layer isn’t visible and cannot be edited.