Photoshop CS6 Basic Useful Tools

Photoshop introduction

What is photoshop? Photoshop is a divine art and it is an image or graphics edition program created by Adobe.  It’s used for editing images and creation graphics in a user friendly environment within many Operation Systems such as Windows and Mac OS X.  It’s used by millions of graphic designers, image editors, image composers, artists, print designers, and standard computer users.  It’s used so commonly that it’s most likely most images you see. Whether in books, magazines, newspapers, posters has been either edited or created in Photoshop. 

Photoshop is the most powerful image editing software available today  used by photographers and graphic artists for image enhancement and editing, print and web design, and digital art. 

Goals of Photoshop

                Understanding what Photoshop does, Selecting and moving images, Viewing and arranging layers, Using image filters, Basic color painting, Image color correction and touch-up, File saving.

Basic Photoshop’s Tools Panels

                Move Tool, Selection Tools, Crop Tools, Eyedropper Tool, Retouching and Painting Tools, Brush Tool, Clone Stamp Tools, History Brush Tools, Eraser Tools, Gradient Tool, Blur Tool, Burn Tool, Sponge Tool, Sharp Tool, Pen Tools, Text Tool, Path Selection Tool, Shape Tools, Hand Tool, Zoom Tool, 3D and View Tools.

Here you are going to see some Basic tools of Photoshop:

            The Move tool (V) is the black arrow at the top of the Tools panel. You can use it to grab and move a selection, whole layers, and guides.

            The Marquee tools (M) are nestled just below the Move tool; they include the Rectangular, Elliptical, Single Row, and Single Column Marquees. You’ll use the Rectangular Marquee the most as it’s great for selecting square and rectangular areas. To use any of these tools, just click and drag diagonally and Photoshop marks your selection with an army of marching ants.

           

TIP: To cycle through the different tools in a tool set, add the Shift Key to that group’s Keyboard shortcut.  For example, to switch between the Rectangular and Elliptical Marquee tools, press Shift-M.

For example  

After selecting with Rectangular Marquee Tool we can Move that particular portion in an image using Move Tool, after using Move Tool the image will be.

The Lasso tools (L) let you draw selections by hand. They’re great for selecting irregular-shaped areas or objects that you can’t get with the Marquee tools. To use the basic Lasso tool, click where you want the selection to start and then drag to draw an outline around the rest of the object. When you release your mouse button, Photoshop automatically adds a straight line that connects the start and end points of the line you drew. The Polygonal Lasso tool is handy for selecting objects with a lot of angles because it draws only straight lines; you simply click when you want to change directions. The Magnetic Lasso tries to guess what you want to select as you hover your cursor over an object.

The Crop tool (C) lets you trim distracting elements from the edges of your image, as well as change the size of your image. Simply use it to draw a box around the part of the image you want to keep and then press Enter to delete everything outside the box.

For example

 

  After Crop image will be shown below.

 

The Eyedropper tool (I) lets you choose a color you want to use as your foreground color chip. It looks like an eyedropper and it’s extremely useful for picking colors for painting, creating new backgrounds and color-correcting images.

The Healing Brush (J) lets you repair imperfections that aren’t round. This tool also looks like a Band-Aid and you can use it to fix wrinkles, dark circles, and so on. You tell Photoshop what you want the problem area to look like by Alt-clicking a good area and then simply paint.

For example

             Click the Healing Brush Tool and rub the selection part holding a mouse. Now the image will be like shown below.

The Brush tool (B) lets you paint with a variety of brushes; its icon looks like you guessed it a little brush. Photoshop includes a ton of built-in brushes, but you can also edit them and create your own.

The Clone Stamp tool (S) whose icon looks like an old-fashioned rubber stamp, works a little differently than the healing tool. Instead of blending pixels together, it copies part of an image to another spot.

For example

Now you going to Clone the chair in next to the present chair:

1)     Take the Clone Stamp Tool and do Alt-clicking in which part of image(Chair) you have to clone,   just one click is enough.

2)     Just rub the pointer in which part you have to place the image(Chair).

3)     Now the image will be shown below.

 

The History Brush (Y) is like a time machine because it lets you paint over parts of your image to reveal a previous version of your work.

The Art History Brush (Y) lets you add bizarre effects to your image by painting to expose a previous state, but with an extra twist: Instead of simply revealing what was there before, it applies effects so the image looks rather impressionistic.

The Eraser tool (E) lets you paint to erase parts of your image. Its icon looks like the pink erasers you used in elementary school and it works nearly the same way: Grab it from the Tools panel and select a mode from the Options bar (Brush, Pencil, or Block mode), and then drag across your image to erase pixels in that area. Erasing on a layer removes pixels from just that layer, while erasing on the Background layer replaces those pixels with your

background color.

The Paint Bucket tool (G) fills areas with solid color. It’s the tool equivalent of the Edit-->Fill command.  It uses whatever color your foreground color chip is, be sure to change that color before reaching for this tool.

The Blur tool lets you paint to make parts of your image look like they’re out of focus. Its icon looks like a raindrop, perhaps because real water drops blur paint. Since it uses a brush cursor, you can use the Options bar to set its size and hardness. (A harder brush leaves more defined edges in its wake; a softer brush leaves more of a blur.)

For example

    1)   You have to select the particular portion want to be blur using The Quick Selection Tool

       2)    Here you going blur the all eggs but not the selected egg, for that Goto -->Select-->Inverse

       3)    Now the selection will be inverse then take the Blur tool and paint all the selection

 

The Horizontal and Vertical Type tools (T) let you add text to your image. As you might suspect, the Horizontal Type tool creates text that runs left to right and the Vertical Type tool creates text that runs top to bottom. You use the Options bar to choose a typeface, point size, and so on.

  

For example

 

      1)      Click on The Text Tool and drag the portion you want to text in the image

     

      2)  Using Free Transformation  Ctrl + T you can transform the text like translation, scaling, rotating.

  

3)    Then hit Enter, now the image will be shown below.

The Rotate View tool (R) lets you rotate your view of an image to give you a more natural angle for painting or drawing—without rotating the image itself in the document. Its icon looks like a hand in front of a diamond shape; you can find it in the Hand tool set.

The Zoom tool (Z), whose icon looks like a magnifying glass, lets you zoom into take a closer look at what you’re editing. When you grab this tool and then click your image, you can keep zooming until you reach 3,200 percent magnification; Alt+click to zoom out.