Tools

| Marquee | Move | Lasso | Magic Wand |
| Paintbrush | Eraser | Pencil/Line | Pen |
| Type | Paint Bucket | Hand |
| Zoom | Color Picker |
Note: This tutorial does not cover every tool

The Toolbar

This window contains most of the power tools for creating and manipulating pixels. A tool is selected when it's in black reverse. You can access tool variants by clicking and holding on the tool icon. Lets take a quick run through the most used tools. You may find it useful to refer to the Quick Reference card at the end of this handout.

Color Picker — Let’s start in the middle with the color picker. Click on the upper left square to set the foreground color. Foreground is the color you will get when you use brush-based tools or the paint bucket. The rainbow strip gives access to color families. Drag it to the Hue you want. The large square gives lots of variations within that hue. Click on the color you want. Readouts on the right give color info. Click on "Only Web Colors" if you want to stick to "Web Safe" colors. Note the number next to the #. This is the hexadecimal code for the color you picked. It won’t mean much to you now, but may be useful to you later. The lower right square sets the background color. This is what you get when you delete or erase something from a layer without transparency. Most of the time, leave this white.

Eyedropper — You can also use the eyedropper to select a color from anywhere on your image. This is handy for matching pixel colors. Many tools will switch to the eyedropper for a moment when you hold down the Alt/Option key.

Marquee — Rectangular, Circular, Single Pixels, and Crop tool are all in here. Dragging tool over an area selects the active pixels in that area. Hold the Shift key for a perfect square or circle. Once a selection is made, actions will only affect the area selected. You can also "Select/Inverse" to change everything but your initial selection. To add to your selection, hold down the Shift key and drag again. The Alt/Option key allows you to remove from your selection. To see your document without the marching ants, select "Hide Edges" from the View menu, or type Ctrl/Command - h. Don’t forget to turn it back on using "Show Edges," or Ctrl/Command - h again.

Crop — Use to crop an image. Beware of the "Fixed Target Size" option for now.

Move — Allows you to move a selection, or everything on a layer. Whatever tool you are using, hold down the Ctrl/Command key to use the Move tool. This saves you jumping back and forth to the Tool bar.

Lasso — Allows amorphous selections. Click and drag around to make a freehand selection. Or use the linear Lasso to click point to point. You can also hold down the Alt/Option key and release the mouse button, after you begin a freehand drag selection to kick in the linear tool. That’s tricky, so be patient if you don’t get it immediately. There’s also a magnetic Lasso. We’ll get into that in the next class.

Magic Wand — Is used to select areas of the same or similar color. "Tolerance" in the options window sets the sensitivity of the tool. 255 will select every pixel. 0 will select only pixels of the same color that touch each other. Typically you’ll have this between 3 and 20. You can also hold down the shift key to add to your selection with another click.

Brush tools — The next set of tools, all within their own box, are tools that use brushes of various sizes. We will only look at 3 today, but you can experiment with the others later.

Paintbrush — Just like it sounds. Select a brush and a color and you can paint it onto the layer you have selected. Note that there are crisp-edge brushes and soft-edge brushes of various sizes. You can also hold the shift key to make a straight line between points.

Eraser — Allows you to erase away a selection. Also uses brushes. Any pixel touched by the eraser is removed and set to transparent. You can get a similar effect using a paintbrush and white, but that leaves the pixels white and opaque. Background eraser allows you to just erase some areas and leave others alone.

Magic Eraser works like the Magic Wand. Play with different options settings for different effects

Pencil/Line — Pencil is similar to Paintbrush, except all brushes are hard-edged with no feathering or anti-aliasing. When you want to edit pixel-by-pixel, use the pencil, set to a one-pixel brush. Line allows you to drag a line onto your image. Set the Options for the number of pixels wide you want your line, and for anti-aliasing (or not).

Paint Bucket — Used to spill color into a selection. The "Tolerance" option controls how color is spilled. 255 will fill the entire selection. 0 will only fill pixels of the same color that touch each other. Settings in between will fill touching pixels whose color is within tolerance.

Pen — The pen tool is used to create "Paths" which can then be used to make selections, fills or lines. We’ll get into the Pen tool in depth in the next class, but feel free to experiment with it on your own.

Type — This tool allows you to create type "objects," each of which becomes a layer. Click with it, then type in your words. There are numerous controls: Font, size, spacing, color, anti-aliasing, etc. This is another tool you should experiment with on your own. The great thing about this tool, is that you can go back in and change your type if you make a mistake. Or change color or any other setting.

Hand — Allows you to move the image around underneath you, say when you are zoomed in on it. You can pull it up at any time, no matter what tool you are using, by holding down the Space Bar.

Zoom — Allows you to zoom in and out from your image. With the tool selected, zoom in (plus sign) is the default. Hold the Alt/Option key down to zoom out (minus sign). When using any other tool, hold the Alt/Option key and Space Bar to zoom out, or the Ctrl/Command key and Space Bar to zoom in.

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