The default location of the toolbox is at the left-most side of Photoshop but you can move this anywhere you see fit. There are many tools in Photoshop and if you're a beginner or seeing Photoshop's interface for the first time you may get overwhelmed but don't worry, with constant use and practice you'll be editing your photos without the help of tutorials or guides.
As I put my mouse on top of one of these tools, a tool tip will pop up. The tool tip helps you in identifying the name of that tool and also, if you can see the letter inside the parenthesis, for example in the Marquee Tool, the letter M is inside the parenthesis. This is the keyboard shortcut for that tool and you can press M on the keyboard to easily switch to the Marquee tool. Other tools also have shortcut letters like the eye-dropper tool – letter I and the eraser tool – letter E.
Shortcut keys are important for fast and convenient editing. For example, I want to select a portion of the picture I just press M to use the Rectangular Marquee tool and select an area on the picture. However, I want to switch to the move tool so I press V which is the shortcut for the move tool. So now I can move to another side of the image or move the image. There are a lot of tools but don’t be discouraged, just familiarize yourself with them and in time, you’ll be using the shortcuts with no problem.
If you noticed, most of the tools have a small black arrow at the lower right. This means that this tool has a fly-out menu which contains other tools under a certain tool category. For example if we click and hold the left mouse button on the Lasso tool, a fly-out menu shows two additional tools – the polygonal lasso tool and the magnetic lasso tool.
To easily access these tools, you can press and hold shift plus the shortcut letter of that tool and you can easily switch from any of the tools in that category. So if I press shift and M, I can switch from any of the Marquee tools and this applies to all the tools. Another way to switch from one tool to another in the same category is to press and hold alt then click the icon of the tool. This will make the tools rotate from one sub-tool to another.
For the last part of this tutorial, we have the color area at the bottom of the toolbox. The default colors for this are black for the foreground and white for the background. The foreground and background colors are important in other aspects of Photoshop but for now the basic is that the foreground color is the color that will show when you start brushing on your canvas. For example you use red for the foreground color; you can then start brushing red onto the image. To quickly get back to the default, just press the letter D on your keyboard.
In previous versions of Photoshop, the toolbox used to be shown in two columns. To do this you can press the two white arrows at the top of the toolbox and you can easily switch from one to a two-column toolbox. Another way to do this is to double-click on the gray bar at the top of the toolbox. You can also press and hold this to drag the toolbox anywhere you like.
Copyright 2011 Notes on Hobbies | Photoshop Interface - Toolbox
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