Main Photoshop Tools – Wingdings Translator Online

Get to know the main tools of Photoshop. We list and explain the tools you need to know to start working with Photoshop.

We continue by taking a look at the main tools that the program offers designers, that is, the tools that are used to perform the most fundamental actions in day-to-day work with Photoshop.

Since this article is part of the introduction to Photoshop, we intend it to serve simply to familiarize yourself with the interface and some concepts used by the program. So, we are not going to explain in detail any of the tools that we are going to discuss yet. That is a task that we leave for the following chapters of this manual, where you will be able to find detailed explanations and examples of use of many of the most important tools (we will link in this text to those articles already published on .com).

So, if you are new to Photoshop or if you want to make an effort to learn how to use the program with ease, the first thing you should know is what are the essential tools for working with Photoshop and where to find them.

To list the main tools we will go from top to bottom and from left to right, just as they are located on the keypad.

selection tools

The selection tools are one of the main ones that exist in Photoshop. As we like to say, to start feeling comfortable inside Photoshop you have to master selections and layers. Therefore, pay close attention to the following utilities.

A tool for making square or rectangular selections.

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Tool to create circular or elliptical selections. It is in the same group as the rectangular frame.

Tool to move layers

Layers are also fundamental in Photoshop. Everything is organized in layers, which you can treat independently. The fact of working with layers offers a lot of versatility to the designs, since you can apply effects, touch-ups and transformations to each layer independently.

It is used to move the content of the layer in which we are working. The layer is moved entirely or only the selected area, if a selection was created. (There are chapters later to explain what they are)

Sophisticated selection tools

In addition to square or circular/elliptical selections, with Photoshop you can make very sophisticated selections. These are the most common and traditional tools for making more elaborate selections, although throughout Photoshop’s history they have added more and more utilities to make selections in many different ways.

This tool is used to make freehand selections by clicking on an area of the image and painting the selection by hand. The truth is that the tool is not widely used in day-to-day work, but it is easy to practice at first.

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It is used to make more complex selections, marking the vertices of a polygon. It is also very useful and easy to handle in your first steps.

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It is for making quick selections of areas of the same color. Clicking on a place in the image selects the entire area that has the same continuous color.

crop tool

The crop tool is very important, since it allows us to change the document very quickly, discarding the part that doesn’t interest us and changing the proportions of the image in a few mouse movements. Surely this tool sounds familiar to you, because many mobile applications use it to touch up photos.

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It is a type of square selection, editable once it has been defined, which is used to crop an image, leaving only the selected area.

drawing tool

The truth is that drawing is one of the least done in Photoshop, since it is not a program to illustrate. However, there are several drawing tools that we can use to be able to make freehand strokes, or erase parts of the image.

This tool is used to draw freehand on the image. Several brushes are available, of different thicknesses and shapes, and you can adjust the hardness of the line, among other things. The brush paints on the layer that is currently active.

The pencil is similar to the brush, with the difference that it makes a stroke without smoothing at the edges and totally opaque.

It is used to erase parts of an image. Be careful, since like many other tools, it only acts on the layer that is selected. That is, it only deletes the things that are in the layer that we are working on. That is why sometimes it may happen that you try to delete something and it does not delete, perhaps because it is on another layer. It has two erase modes, one the pencil mode, which erases everything without smoothing, and the brush mode, which erases by blurring the edges. Also, just like brushes and pencil, there are several thicknesses for the eraser line.

color painting tool

The following tools are also used for drawing, but allow you to paint surfaces with color in one go. The simplest would be the paint bucket, which allows us to put a homogeneous solid color on a surface, which you will generally have delimited before with a selection. But almost more important is the gradient tool, which allows us to be a little more detailed and go beyond solid colors.

This tool is used to fill an entire layer or a selected area of the layer with color. Fill with the color that has been selected in the toolbar as the foreground color.

With this tool we can make color gradients, it works like the paint bucket, filling in color in an entire layer or in the selected area of a layer, with the difference that to make the gradient we have to draw a line, clicking with the mouse and dragging, so that the gradient is made in that marked space.

text writing tool

Texts are also essential when creating graphics and designs in Photoshop. The text tool is quite sophisticated in Photoshop and is widely used. It is ideal to take advantage thanks to the use of fonts and to achieve attractive designs without the need to use stock images.

It is used to write text on an image. The text can be written in different fonts and sizes and will have the foreground color that has been selected. Associated with this tool (if we click with a long press) we will see that there are other text tools, among which the vertical text tool could be useful.

Tool to make all kinds of shapes

Now we are going to look at various Photoshop tools for creating shapes. The pen is one of the most complex to work with and in it there are many hidden utilities for many types of jobs. We will study it further for the end of the manual. Surely you will be able to get a lot of use out of square shapes, lines or custom shapes right now, since they are much simpler and more intuitive.

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This tool is very useful, but somewhat complex to handle. It is used to make paths of any type, curved or polygonal. The good thing is that it allows us to edit the routes once they are done and that they can be adjusted to any route that we need, however complex it may be. Along with the Pen tool you will have to learn to use other complementary tools that are part of the same group.

Other essential Photoshop tools

Below we find other Photoshop tools that are very useful in day-to-day design.

With the eyedropper we can select colors, from any part of the image, to place them as foreground color.

This tool is used to move the canvas. It does not move or modify any part of the image, but rather it translates the area that we are seeing of the image, if the entire canvas does not fit in the window that we have open, either because the image is very large or because we have zoomed in .

The zoom helps us to enlarge or reduce the image, but without altering the image. You simply zoom in to make it look bigger and we can make touch-ups with more precision, or zoom out to make the image smaller and thus be able to see it all on our screen.

conclusion

With this we have made a list of the most used tools within Photoshop. They are not the only ones, but they are the ones that are used the most on a day-to-day basis and on which we are going to focus in the beginnings of .com web development. You can experiment with each of them to get to know them and later we will see in detail how to handle them.