Adobe Photoshop Tool Names

Adobe Photoshop Tools Names And Functions
Adobe Photoshop Tool Names 2016

Photoshop is an incredibly powerful but also intimidating application. If you've wanted to start using Photoshop but didn't know where to start, we'll be teaching you the basics all week long.

The video above is your lesson. It's short considering how much it covers and long considering it's on the internet. In the video, we take a look at every tool in the toolbar, your palettes on the right side of the screen, and what you'll find in the menus. Below you'll find a reference for this lesson. Once the lessons are over, we'll provide everything all in one place and a downloadable PDF file containing references for each lesson.

Wait! I don't have Photoshop!

Jan 16, 2018 Adobe Photoshop CC 2018 - Brush Tools Show Preview and Name. Mixer Brush tool missing in Photoshop CC 2018 How To get. How to make a basic sketch pencil brush in adobe photoshop custom brush. Photoshop Tools. Just like an artist’s work table, the toolbar holds Photoshop tools. It is the long, narrow palette on the far left side of the work area contains the tools you’ll use to draw, paint, erase, and do tons of other things whilst working on your image. Let’s start off by taking a closer look at what’s actually in the toolbar.

Are you not currently a Photoshop user? Adobe offers a Photoshop 30-day trial that you can download right now and it will provide you with plenty of time to learn how it works. If you don't want to eventually purchase Photoshop because it's too expensive, much of what we're going to discuss in these lessons will apply to not just to Photoshop but pretty much most of the standard photo-editing and design tools you'll find (Pixelmator is a great $30 alternative on the Mac, and GIMP is a free, open-source cross-platform option). We've chosen Photoshop because it's the most commonly used, but you're welcome to follow along using other software as well. Today's lesson is pretty Photoshop-specific, but as we move along you should be able to use other software to do most of what we discuss.

Ready? Let's get started.

The Toolbar

We're not going to take a look at every single tool but we are going to look at almost every one of them. While this overview will give you an idea of what each tool does, go find yourself a photo and start playing around with them.

Move Tool (Keyboard: V)

The move tool simply lets you move objects in a given layer around the Photoshop canvas. To use it, click anywhere on the canvas and drag. As you drag, the Photoshop layer will move with your mouse.

Marquee (Keyboard: M)

The marquee lets you select part of the canvas in a specific shape. By default you get a rectangular (or perfect square if you hold down shift while selecting), but you can also select in the shape of an ellipse (or a perfect circle if you hold down shift while selecting).

Lasso (Keyboard: L)

The lasso is a free-form selection tool that lets you drag around the canvas and select anything the lasso'd area covers. Within this tool you also have access to the polygonal lasso, which lets you create a selection by clicking around on the canvas and creating points, and the magnetic lasso, which works the same as the regular lasso but attempts to detect edges for you and automatically snap to them.

Magic Wand (Keyboard: W)

Clicking an area with the magic wand will tell Photoshop to select the spot you clicked on and anything around it that's similar. This tool can be used as a crude way to remove backgrounds from photos.

Crop Tool (Keyboard: C)

The crop tool is used to (surprise!) crop your pictures. You can specify the exact size and constrain the crop tool to those proportions, or you can just crop to any size you please.

Eyedropper (Keyboard: I)

The eyedropper tool lets you click on any part of the canvas and sample the color at that exact point. The eyedropper will change your foreground color to whatever color it sampled from the canvas.

Healing Brush (Keyboard: J)

The healing brush lets you sample part of the photograph and use it to paint over another part. Once you're finished, Photoshop will examine surrounding areas and try to blend what you painted in with the rest of the picture.

Paintbrush and Pencil (Keyboard: B)

The paintbrush is a tool that emulates a paintbrush and the pencil is a tool that emulates a pencil. The paintbrush, however, can be set to many different kinds of brushes. You can paint with standard paintbrush and airbrush styles, or even paint with leaves and other shapes as well.

Clone Stamp (Keyboard: S)

Like the healing brush, the clone stamp lets you sample part of the photograph and use it to paint over another part. With the clone stamp, however, that's it. Photoshop doesn't do anything beyond painting one area over a new area.

History Brush (Keyboard: Y)

The history brush lets you paint back in time. Photoshop keeps track of all the moves you make (well, 50 by default) and the history brush lets you paint the past back into the current photo. Say you brightened up the entire photo but you wanted to make a certain area look like it did before you brightened it, you can take the history brush and paint that area to bring back the previous darkness.

Eraser Tool (Keyboard: E)

The erase tool is almost identical to the paintbrush, except it erases instead of paints.

Paint Can and Gradient Tools (Keyboard: G)

The paint can tool lets you fill in a specific area with the current foreground color. The gradient tool will, by default, create a gradient that blends the foreground and background tool (though you can load and create preset gradients as well, some of which use than two colors).

Blur, Sharpen, and Smudge Tools (Keyboard: None)

All three of these tools act like paintbrushes, but each has a different impact on your picture. The blur tool will blur the area where you paint, the sharpen tool will sharpen it, and the smudge tool will smudge the area all around the canvas. The smudge tool is very useful in drawing for creating nicely blended colors or for creating wisps and smoke that you can add to your photos.

Burn, Dodge, and Sponge Tools (Keyboard: O)

The burn, dodge, and sponge tools are paintbrush-like tools that manipulate light and color intensity. The burn tool can make areas in your photo darker. The dodge tool can make them lighter. The sponge tool can saturate or desaturate color in the area you paint with it. These are all very useful tools for photo touch ups.

Pen Tool (Keyboard: P)

The pen tool is used for drawing vector graphics. It can also be used to create paths that can be used for various things that we'll discuss in a later lesson (although if you watch the video you can see a type path being created).

Type Tool (Keyboard: T)

The type tool lets you type horizontally. Tools hidden beneath the horizontal type tool will let you type vertically and also create horizontal and vertical text masks.

Path Tool (Keyboard: A)

The path tool lets you move any created paths around. It's like the move tool, but for paths.

Shape Tool (Keyboard: U)

The shape tool lets you create vector rectangles, rounded rectangles, circles, polygons, lines, and custom shapes. These tools are very useful when designing or when creating shape masks for photos.

3D Tools

These are the 3D tools. We're not going to be dealing with 3D stuff in these lessons so all you really need to know is that these exist. If you're curious, this video will give you an idea of what these tools can do.

Adobe Photoshop Tools Names And Functions

Hand Tool (Keyboard: H)

The hand tool allows you to click and drag around the Photoshop canvas. If the entire canvas currently fits on the screen, this tool won't do anything. This tool is for easily navigating around when you're zoomed in, or a picture is simple too big to fit on the screen at 100%.

Zoom Tool (Keyboard: Z)

The zoom tool lets you zoom in and out of the Photoshop canvas by clicking on a given area. By default, the zoom tool only zooms in. To zoom out, hold down the option key and use the zoom tool as you normally would.

Color Selection Tools (Keyboard: D for defaults, X to switch foreground and background colors)

These tools let you manage the colors you're using. The color on top is the foreground color and the color in back is the background color. The foreground color is what your brushes will use. The background color is what will be used if you delete something from the background or extend it (although now, Photoshop CS5 will give you the option for using your foreground color instead in some circumstances). The two smaller icons up top are shortcut functions. The left one, showing a black square on a white square, will set your foreground and background colors to the defaults (Keyboard: D). The double-headed curved arrow will swap your foreground and background color (Keyboard: X). Clicking on either the foreground or background color will bring up a color picker so you can set them to precisely the color you want.

Palettes

Palettes are the things that you see sitting over on the right side of your screen. They make it easy for you to navigate through your document, add adjustments, switch modes, and other things.

Layers

The layers palette lets you see all the layers in your document. As you start getting to know Photoshop, you'll find yourself in this palette more than any other. It'll let you organize and arrange your layers, set blending modes, set visibility and opacity of layers, group and merge layers, and a bunch of other neat things we'll learn about in future lessons.

Adjustments

Your adjustments panel is where you can easily create and edit adjustment layers. Adjustment layers are non-destructive image alterations that affect all the layers below them and can easily be turned on and off. Their most common use is for color correction (namely the Levels and Curves adjustments, but there are many different kinds of adjustments you can perform that can dramatically alter the look of your image.

Color Channels

The color channels palette will let you look at the specific colors that make up your picture. If you're in RGB mode you'll get red, green, and blue. These color channels will differ if you're in a different color space (such as CMYK or LAB). When you choose a specific color, you'll notice you'll be shown your image in different versions of black and white. This is because each color channel is simply a monochromatic images representing the light in each channel (e.g. the red channel is just a look at the red light in your photo). Switching between these different channels is useful for making color channel-specific touch ups, overall contrast enhancements, and also for converting your photo to black and white in a compelling way. This will be discussed in greater detail in a later lesson about color correction and photo enhancements.

Color Picker

This palette will let you easily alter your foreground and background colors using sliders.

Color Swatches

The color swatches palette is a set of pre-defined colors you can quickly choose from. You can load in several other pre-made swatch collections or create your own, too.

History

The history palette lets you go back in time to undo any previous alterations. The standard undo command (in the edit menu) will simply toggle between undoing and redoing the latest action performed on your image. The history panel is where you can go back much further (50 actions by default).

Text

The text palette, and the paragraph palette below it, let you make all sorts of adjustments to any text you create with the type tool. These options are very similar to what you'll find in a word processing, but you can also specify things like character width and spacing which are more useful in design.

Menus

Most of what you'll find in Photoshop's menus can be found using the previously discussed tools. Nonetheless, we're going to take a quick look at some notable items in each of the menus.

Adobe Photoshop Tool Names 2016

File

File, as usual, handles opening, saving, and closing operations. Towards the end of these lessons we'll be taking a look at your different saving options (namely Save for Web).

Edit

Edit, as usual, brings you copy, cut, and paste. In Photoshop, it's also where you transform layers and set your color spaces.

Image

Image brings you canvas and image adjustments, including destructive effects that you'll also find in your adjustments palette. Options in this menu are designed to affect the image as a whole, although many adjustments are applied to only a single layer.

Layer

Layer lets you do all of the things you can do in the layer palette with a few more options. This menu also lets you create adjustment layers and smart objects (a group of layers treated as a single object).

Select

While the marquee and lasso tools will be your main means of selecting things, the select menu can help you refine that selection or create entirely new selections based on certain criteria (such as color range and luminosity).

Filter

Filter brings you a wealth of built-in (and, if installed, third-party) Photoshop filters that can blur, sharpen, distort, and alter your image (or layers of the image) in many different and unique ways. The best way to get acquainted with these filters is to try them all. That can take a little time, but it's fun to play around with them and see what they do. We'll be getting into the specifics in subsequent lessons, but only looking at a few commonly useful filters.

Analysis

Analysis provides you with measurement tools. There will be times when you need them to make accurate alterations to your images. We will not be covering anything in this menu in these basic lessons.

3D

As previously noted, we're not covering 3D. If you decide to learn more about 3D later, you may want to explore this menu on your own at some point.

View

View provides you with various view options, lets you hide and show line guides you've created (see video for an example), and make Photoshop snap (or not snap) to corners, edges, and to the grid on the canvas. Viewing of this invisible grid can also be turned on and off in the View menu.

Window

Window lets you hide and show certain windows and palettes. You can also arrange your Photoshop windows and palettes however you want and save them as a window preset.

That's all for today! In the next lesson we'll be learning about color correction, touch-ups, and photo enhancement.
You can contact Adam Dachis, the author of this post, at adachis@lifehacker.com. You can also follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

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When it comes to localized image editing, Photoshop is probably a photographer’s best choice among different post-processing software. The beauty and power of this platform lies within the gazillions of tools and editing options it offers. Yes, it can be overwhelming for certain people, but when it comes to versatility in manipulating images, Photoshop has a clear advantage.
Among these powerful tools is the ability to select areas of an image for more precise handling. If you've ever tried dodging or burning a part of an image only to see that you actually included an area you didn't want to include, then you know selective editing is important. It also works best if you wanted to change the brightness, contrast, and other characteristics of a certain area instead of the whole picture. This is where selection tools are most useful.
The good news is that Photoshop gives you more than a handful of options from quick and easy selection methods to more complex ones that can please even the most meticulous of pixel-peepers. If knowing just a couple can be helpful enough, how about getting acquainted with 10 different selection tools? So launch Photoshop now as you read this and follow along.

The marching ants that define a selection

The most obvious selection tools in PS are found in the toolbar which is located together with your brushes, pens, and cloning tools.
1. Marquee
The first one from the top of the toolbar is the Marquee tool. The Marquee tool is the most basic selection tool available in Photoshop. To use it, just click and drag around an area you want to select. You can choose between rectangular, circular, single line row or single column row marquee options by holding down the button and selecting your chosen marquee tool.

2. Lasso
Since the marquee tool is limited by a frame, circle, or line, it’s unavoidable to select more that what you actually want to select. To solve this problem, you can use the lasso tool. It works like the marquee tool except that it gives you the ability to move around areas freely without restriction. This allows you to avoid areas that you don’t want to include. To do this, just click and drag the pointer around an area you want to select.

A variation of this is the polygonal lasso tool which is a freehand selection tool that works similar to the pen tool but for selection purposes. The selection is restricted to polygonal outlines but is easier to use than the lasso tool because you don’t have to drag the pointer around. Instead, just click on different points along a path that you want to select. It allows you to select freely based on the points.

3. Magnetic lasso tool
The Magnetic Lasso Tool is a very useful outlining tool as it is more precise than the other lasso tools. It follows lines and outlines like a magnet which makes it easier to select elements with contours. Just click on the first point and move the pointer along the path or outline you wish to follow and finish the selection by going back to the original point.

4. Magic Wand
The magic wand is used to select an area based on a specific color. It is best used when selecting areas where color is varied but you want to select a specific color area. This makes selection faster when dealing with contours and sharp edges that are normally difficult to reach and takes time to select using the freehand tools. This tool is used by simply clicking on a certain color in a desired area you want to select. Magic Wand and Quick Selection share the same button space. Click and hold the icon to reveal the two options.

5. Quick Selection
The quick selection tool works similarly to the magic wand. It selects areas based on color and tone. Just click on an area you want to include in the selection and Photoshop will automatically determine the area you want selected. But the beauty of this tool lies in its ability to extend to other areas that you choose to include. You can choose to include or remove certain areas using the add to selection and subtract a selection options in the tool options, respectively. It definitely makes selections quick and easy.

Aside from the selection options in the toolbar, there is a section in the Photoshop menu that is fully dedicated to selection – the Select sub-menu. Sadly, not too many take time to check the tools there. In fact, the selection tools in there are quite useful when combined with other selection tools. Here are some:

6. Color Range
Hidden under the Select sub-menu is one of the most useful selection tools available in Photoshop – Color Range. Color range works similarly with the magic wand too. But instead of a limited selection based on a specific area, Color Range universally includes areas in the selection given a specific scope of colors you choose from within the image. Multiple color selection and limitation is also available by using the add and subtract eye dropper options.

7. Inverse
Accessible through the Select sub-menu, Inverse is used only with a pre-existing selection. It automatically selects the area that isn’t selected initially and deselects the pre-existing selection, therefore inversing the process. If selecting an area is more difficult than selecting the areas around it, you can use inverse by selecting those areas outside and choosing to inverse the selection later. This makes the process faster. Just look at the example below. Because the background has an even tone compared to the subject, you can choose to select the subject using another tool first and then simply use the Inverse tool to select the subject. Ctrl + I is a quick keyboard shortcut that you can use to invert selection.

8. Grow
Again, accessible through the Select sub-menu, Grow is a selection option also used with a pre-existing selection. Grow simply extends the selection based on the current selection, usually based on color and tone. The example below shows that the selection expanded to cover a wider area but still within the confines of its tone and color. It further expanded when you use to Grow tool one more time. You can repeat the process until your desired area is selected fully.

9. Similar
Similar is also accessible through the Select sub-menu, also works with a pre-existing selection and is much like color range where it extends the selection to the whole image given the specific color and tonal range of the existing selection. Let’s say you've selected a patch of clouds in the sky, you can extend the selection to include the other clouds which would probably have the same color and tonal range using Similar. Take note however that it will also include areas in your frame that are of similar color and tonal range even if they aren't clouds. Like Grow, this process can be repeated as desired.

10. Refine Edges
When you need to be meticulous about the edges of a selection, you can use this tool to manipulate or customize the contours of the selection given in the Refine Edges options. It takes a lot of practice and a little getting used to before being able to fully understand using this tool but it is indeed helpful in making your selection more precise. Accessible through the Select sub-menu.

These 10 tools are simply the most convenient selection tools available in Photoshop. There are also other techniques available in Photoshop where you can maximize your selections for more effective image manipulation. Each tool and technique has its edge in terms of speed or its ability to be precise. Knowing what to use given your specific need will definitely be an advantage.
Further resources on Photoshop selection tools