🙂Hello & Welcome Back🙂
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| Thom & I |
This week has been rather hectic for me. I have been doing a lot of work through The City of South Bend Venues Parks and Arts for upcoming events. Although these events may not be disclosed the chaos around the office has made me sit down and reflect on my journey so far as a Graphic Designer.
Flashback about 8 years ago - my freshman year in High School! This was the point in my life where I met someone named Thom. He welcomed me into the world of design. I remembered he lived by the phrase KISS. It stood for 'Keep it Simple Stupid'. At this point I was rather amused with him and what his Graphic Arts class was about.
One of the very first days he began to introduce us to Photoshop. One of the primary tools within Photoshop is the Tools Panel. This is critical to learn if you're on your way to mastering Photoshop.
Throughout this tutorial, I will briefly be describing the essentials within the tools panel. Although I will only be covering the basics, a full explanation of all the tools can be found here.
Type of Tutorial: Beginner
Resources Needed: None
Tool Break Down
Upon opening Photoshop you will notice the tools panel on the left side of the screen. You can view the panel in a single column like you see to the right or you can shift the tools to appear in two columns. This can be achieved by hitting the >> symbol in the upper right corner of the tools panel.
The tools panel can be broken up into a few different sections.
- Selection tools
- Crop and Slice tools
- Retouching tools
- Painting tools
- Navigation tools
Selection Tools
The Marquee Tools
🔑 Keyboard Shortcut: M
This tool allows you to make rectangular, elliptical, single column and row selections.
🔑 Keyboard Shortcut: L
This tool allows you to make freehand, Polygonal (straight-edged), and magnetic (snap-to) selections.
🔑 Keyboard Shortcut: W
The Quick selection tool allows you to quickly paint a selection. Selected something you didn't need? Hold down alt while painting over unwanted selections.
The Magic Wand tool makes a
selection based on similar colors
Crop Tool
🔑Keyboard shortcut: C
The crop tool is a tool that trims out unwanted pixels.
Retouching Tools
🔑Keyboard Shortcut: J
- The Spot Healing Brush Tool Removes blemishes. With this tool, you simply paint over the area you want to correct (this is perfect for fixing flawed skin).
- Healing Brush Tool fixes imperfections within the image. This tool is good when restoring old photos.
- Patch Tool repairs flaws in a selected area. This tool could be ideal if you wanted to remove tattoos from a person skin
- Content-Aware Move Tool this tool allows you to either extend an object within a photograph or completely move the subject within the photograph without distorting the image.
- Red Eye Tool by dragging over the pupil with this tool selected you can easily fix red-eye glare
Painting Tools
🔑 Keyboard Shortcut: B
The Brush Tool allows you to paint freely on an image
🔑 Keyboard Shortcut: G
The Paint Bucket Tool allows you to fill either a selected area or area with similar pixels with the foreground color selected.
Navigation Tools
The Zoom Tool allows you to zoom either in or out of an image.
The Hand Tool allows you to move the image around the window.
What are these boxes??
🔑 Keyboard Shortcuts: Return to default (B&W)
🔑 Keyboard Shortcuts: Exchange Foreground and background
- The box on the bottom represents your Background color.
- The box on top represents your Foreground color
- You can change these colors by double-clicking on a square and selecting a new color from the color chart.
--End--
Looking for an in-depth VISUAL tutorial of how to use each individual tool? Check out this video!
Hungry for more design? Check out The Designer Diary of Dilemmas. A blog showcasing the raw and unfiltered perspective of what its like to be a student Graphic Designer.
Soon you'll be on your way to mastering the tools panel and mastering Photoshop!
Looking for something more?
Ready to beginning thinking outside of the box?
Write a comment below with any tutorials you would love to see!
** Tutorials will be uploaded every Thursday by 12 PM EST **
This was a perfect post for a beginner learning Photoshop. I remember going over Photoshop tools and becoming overwhelmed by the sheer number of them. You did a great job explaining in simple terms what each tool does. You may want to mention the keyboard shortcut CTRL + Z (windows) or CMD + Z (mac) so a Photoshop beginner won't worry about making mistakes (or explain the history panel).
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ReplyDeleteSavannah, I love this post. Your post has broken down concepts in way that it seems like I could do it myself. Even though, most likely I can't. But the idea of keeping it simple awesome. A resource that could also be helpful is https://adobe.ly/1lRXCUN.
ReplyDeleteA person who is able to break concept down to a simple idea is a genius. Thank you for sharing.