Photoshop: The Toolbar Explained
The Toolbar Explained
WIP
This isn't a tutorial so much as a quick reference manual. If you ever have any questions about what does what on the toolbar, you'll have this to fall back on.
Notice that some of the tools have a little black notch along the bottom right of the icon? That means there are multiple subtools under this selection. You access them by 
on the icon to bring up its submenu.
1- The Move Tool
Fairly Self Explanatory. With nothing selected, it'll move whatever you have in a selected layer, up to an including your entire image. If you marquee select something, it'll move that. Yeah, I know. No crap. But hey, I said I was going indepth here.
You can also do precise moves using your arrow keys. Hitting the right arrow key will move your selection one pixel to the right. Holding down shift and the arrow keys speeds it up, jumping about 5-10 pixels per step.
2 - Marquee Selection Tools
Rightclicking gives you 4 subtools. Rectangular, Elliptical, Horizontal Row, Vertical Row. These are all pretty self evident here. Playing with them for 5 seconds will give you a better idea of what they do than any wordy explanation I can give.
But there are some handy tricks that aren't very obvious, such as being able to tailor your selection. So, breakdown time.
Without an active marquee up, holding down alt will grow out a uniform selection from the middle of your mouse pointer. Not too handy with the rectangle, but almost necessary with the elliptical marquee.
With an active marquee up, holding down shift while you draw out another marquee adds to the selection, and alt subtracts from it. This is good for selecting something difficult, or making weird shapes to fill in like this...
So handy! Also, you can grow, shrink, feather, or invert selections by going to the select dropdown menu at the top of the PS window. You have quite a few tools available to fine tune your marquee selections...and you'll use em.
Holding down ALT while the marquee tool is active temporarily enables the move tool, so you don't have to switch back and forth constantly.
3- Lasso Tools
Yet another selection tool, but more freeform than the marquees. Lasso lets you draw a selection, polygonal lets you block one in one point at a time for more exacting selections, and magnetic tries to follow shapes and patterns.
FYI, the magnetic lasso is annoying as hell to use. You have to draw along your intended selection sllllooooowwwwly for it to align to your intended target. But what if you sneeze? TOO BAD! You're screwed. Start over again from the beginning. Don't use it unless you hate yourself, really love tedious BS, or have an inhumanly stable hand.
4 - Quick Selection Tools
The much ballyhooed magic wand, and the namesake quick selection tool. Weirdly enough, I've never much used the quick selection tool, but the magic wand is handy for any number of situations. Want to select a range of colors across your texture? Want to grab the white space surrounding a tree limb so you can cut it out? With a few tweaks to sensitivity, you can use the magic wand to do just that.
….though you do have to really fine tweak the settings to get it exact. Like say you want to select a leaf to use as an alpha mask. Unless your source is a lossless file type, it's sometimes better just to paint it out by hand, as the magic wand can and will pick up jpeg artifacts.
5 - Crop and Slice Tools
Another self explanatory set of tools. More useful for photo editing than texturing. Mostly, I just marquee and CTRL+x to cut, or CTRL+c to copy and CTRL+v to paste.
6 - Color Selection Tools
I should've called this category the Miscellaneous Stuff Tools. The one you'll use the most here is the eyedropper tool, which lets you grab a color from your picture and applies it to the color switcher for later use. As for the other tools?
Color Sample Tool – for those moments when you absolutely need to know the exact RGB specifications of the targetted color. There's probably more to this tool than I realize, but for now, it seems more a tool for the anal retentive among us.
Ruler Tool – Measures stuff. How many pixels wide is this? ...oh.
Note Tools – lets you write love letters to yourself so you can find them later and cheer yourself up.
[b] 7 - Quick Fix Tools[/b]
For when you need something fixed quickly.
Spot Healing Brush Tool – Lets you paint over a section of your picture, and blends it in with the surrounding pixels. Good for blending when used in small doses.
Healing Brush Tool – Like the spot healing brush mixed with the clone tool. You alt-click to define a point elsewhere on your picture, then paint somewhere else. It'll take that point of reference, and blend it with the underlying area of your picture. It's useful for some things, I guess. Truthfully, I rarely ever use any of the tools here.
Patch Tool – Does this neat looking thing that I can find absolutely no use for. Sort of like a lasso selection mixed with the healing brush tools.
Red Eye Tool – Just like Visine. It gets the red out.
[b] 8 - Drawing Tools[/b]
Brush Tool – Wot you paint with.
Pencil Tool – Almost exactly like the brush tool, but it seems...I dunno...more exact somehow.
(interesting little aside on the brush and pencil. If you want to paint a straight vertical or horizontal line, hold down shift, and start painting. As long as you hold down shift, you won't be able to paint in any other direction. Alternately, you can hold down shift, click a dot on one point, and click in another, and PS will draw a line directly to the second dot.
Color Replacement Tool – Normalizes the color of your picture to whatever color is selected in your color swapper. Like say you have a blue section you want to paint red, but still keep your shading, and variation of colors. You'll use this tool to do just that. I honestly don't think I've never found a use for this tool. Your mileage may vary, though.
Mixer Brush Tool – Takes the color on your switcher, and blurbs it in with the pixels you're painting on. Sorta like painting with wet oils. Good for smearing stuff.
[b] 9 – Stamp Tools[/b]
Clone Tool – Alt-click to select a point of reference, and lets you paint that reference elsewhere on your picture. A very very very VERY handy tool for texturing. Use it with a soft brush, and you can blend and add variance to a lot of stuff.
Pattern Tool – Lets you select a pattern from the pattern palette, then paint it in. Good for something, I guess. I never use it.
[b]10 – History Brushes[/b]
History Brush – Say you did a lot of work in a specific area, but you don't like one specific change in that specific area. Use the History Brush to paint in that specific area to go back to earlier changes without affecting all your changes. If you've ever seen a photo that's mostly in black and white, but has a color subject, this is the tool they used to achieve that effect. Now you know.
Art History Brush – Same as History, but I believe only applied to changes made with brushes, pencil, and maybe the paintbucket. I don't think I've ever used this tool even a single time, so I dunno exactly what it does.
[b]11 – Eraser Tools[/b]
Eraser Tool – Pretty self explanatory. Erases what you paint over, and leaves a trail of whatever your subcolor is on your color switcher.
Background Eraser – Same as the eraser, but it cuts through the image, and leaves a swatch down to the layer below.
Magic Eraser Tool – Like the eraser mixed with the magic wand. If you need to delete large swaths of colors, then this is your tool.
[b]12 – Paintbucket/Gradient[/b]
Paintbucket – Everyone knows what this is. Dumps color all over your picture. Per pixel if you've got the tolerace set tight, or whole areas if it's loose.
Gradient Tool – This tool is easy to understand, hard to explain. You select a gradient pattern, and draw out a line of whatever length. PS will apply the gradient to the length of the line you drew. Good for painting some shadows, or adding curvature to a flat object.
[b]13 – Sharpen/Blur/Smudge[/b]
Sharpen – Like applying the sharpen filter to whereever you paint. The more you paint, the more you sharpen. Good for bringing out details and highlights on specific areas. Use in moderation.
Blur – Like applying the blur filter to whever you paint. The more you paint, the more you blur. Good for blending harsh edges together. As with sharpen, you want to use this in moderation.
Smudge – Takes the pixels whereever you paint, and pushes them into each other. Think of it as sorta like pushing your finger through a wet painting.
[b]14 – Dodge/Burn/Sponge[/b]
Dodge – Whitens where you paint. Why they call it dodge, I have no idea. Good for painting highlights directly on your picture
Burn – Opposite of dodge. Darkens where you paint. Good for painting shadows.
Sponge - Kinda sucks the color out of the pixels you paint. Kinda. Hard to explain.
[b]15 – Pen Tools [/b]
Think of these as a small selection of vector tools from Adobe Illustrator. All of these are good for drawing in detail frames, or defining a mask to make fine selections. I only use these on rare occasion.
Pen Tool – Lets you define edges with Bezier Curves.
Freeform Pen Tool – Same as the Pen Tool, but you don't draw point to point. You just draw, and it makes a vector.
Add Anchor Point – For the Pen Tool. If you need another curve in there, use this
Subtract Anchor Point – Deletes an anchor point if you don't need it.
Convert Point Tool - As far as I can tell, it lets you reedit an anchor from scratch.
[b]16 – Text Tools[/b]
I ain't gonna go indepth with these. You need to type words on your texture? Use your text tools.
[b] 17 - ...something[/b]
Well, after playing around with my pen tools, I figured out what these tools are. They let you select specfic stuff on your vector drawings. Wow, I learned something new! :D
[b]18 – Marquee Fills[/b]
MS Paint in Photoshop. You get a bunch of shapes, you draw them, and they either make a line drawing of varying thickness, or a solid shape. Great for defining basic shapes on a future texture map.
[b]19 – Grab/Rotate Canvas[/b]
Grab is good for scrolling through your picture when you're zoomed in. It's the default left-click application when you're using a pen tablet. Rotate Canvas lets you...yeah, rotate your canvas around. If you find yourself wanting to paint something, but find it more comfortable to paint in a certain direction, then use this to...yeah, rotate your canvas around.
[b]20 – Zoom[/b]
I don't need to explain this. But for the sake of completion, I'll explain it.
It lets you zoom in and out of your picture.
There.
Whew, holy shit. It took me an hour and a half to write this out. Hope you all find it useful. :D
