Photoshop Toolbox Selection, Crop & Slice Tools Description

ABOUT ADOBE PHOTOSHOP TOOLBOX

In this lesson, you’ll be introduced to Adobe Photoshop’s Toolbox, and a lot of the tools it has to offer. One of the first things you encounter when you start using Photoshop is its toolbox. You use the toolbox to access all of Photoshop's tools, letting you do anything from moving stuff around through to painting, filling with colour, creating text, and lots more. A proper understanding of the tools showcased in this tutorial will lead to better understanding of Photoshop in general.

The toolbox contains 28 icons and around 60 tools, and it can seem very confusing if you are not used to it. Never fear — it all starts to make sense once you get to know your way around the various tools, and understand how they are grouped together.

This tutorial gets you up to speed with the Photoshop toolbox, and each of the tools it contains. By the time you've finished reading it, you'll be well on your way to working proficiently with the Photoshop toolbox, and you'll have a good general understanding of all the tools in Photoshop too.

So let's get started!

The toolbox in Photoshop is split up into 4 unique categories so that finding the right tool is never a hassle. Those categories are:

1.  Selection, Crop & Slice Tools
2.   Retouch & Paint Tools
3.   Drawing & Type Tools (Vector Tools)
4.   Annotations & Measurement Tools

In addition to these 4 sections a few other components make up the toolbox, most notably, the Foreground andBackground colors.

Now that you have seen how the tools are all organized, lets take a look at some of the most vital tools Photoshop has to offer.

OPTIONS BAR

When you have chosen a tool from the Toolbox, look in the Options bar for ways to apply settings to the tool. As you select a particular tool, the Options bar shows the settings for that tool in that context. So the Options bar always has different options available depending on the tool selected. Not all tools have options you can change, but most of them have some options you can change in the Options bar.

Understanding Type Options

After you select one of the type tools, many options are available in the Options bar. Choose a font family from the font family menu. In Photoshop CS2, a preview of your font families shows up in the menu. If different font styles like Bold and Italic or Oblique are built into the font, those are available under the font style menu in the Options bar. Change the point size of the font from the Font Size menu. You can select one of the sizes in the menu or type your own value in the box. The highlighted text in the type layer is updated; if no type was selected, the next characters typed use these settings. When you use the Character and Paragraph palettes, these options and more are available, but the convenience of the Options bar is what makes it so valuable.

Selection Tools

The Selection tools are used to designate areas that you will be cutting out, cropping, painting within, or applying filters to. The area not selected is usually unaffected when you manipulate the image. The selection tools are as as follows:-

Marquee Tools : The Marquee Tools are used for selecting objects such as rectangles, squares, and ellipses. The Marquee tools are:

       Rectangular Marquee: Click in the image and drag to select a rectangular area. Shift-  
      drag to select a square area.

       Elliptical Marquee: Click in the image and drag to select an elliptical area. Shift-drag to  
      select a circular area.

       Single Row Marquee: Click in the image to select a single row of pixels. Drag to select a 
      different row.
  Single Column Marquee: Click in the image to select a single column of pixels. Drag to   
      select a different column.

Move (V):  This tool moves the content of the layer you are working with. The Move tool lets you click and drag a layer to move it around a document. Shift-drag to lock movement to 45 degrees angle. Another way to do it is drag to make a copy of the layer and position the copy.

Lasso (L): Use this tool to draw a freeform selection. Click in the image and drag to select an area. Release the mouse button to complete the selection.

      Polygonal Lasso (L): After you select this tool, click, release, and drag the image to mark the corners (and draw the edges) of a polygonal selection.

  Magnetic Lasso (L): With an image on screen, this tool follows the contours of part of an image as it creates a selection marquee. It’s one useful way to cut out a subject from its background.

Magic Wand (W): This tool selects parts of the image by color similarity. Adjust the Tolerance setting in the Options bar to select more or fewer of the surrounding similar colors.

CROP AND SLICE TOOLS

The Crop and Slice tools are used to separate and eventually extract or use part of the image that is most important. Cropping takes out everything outside your cropping area. Slicing an image in to multiple areas makes smaller image tiles from the main image.

• Crop (C): Click and drag with this tool to create an adjustable crop area of your image. Press Enter to crop the canvas to your rectangular area. Press Esc to cancel the crop. After you crop your image, part of the image is gone; make sure that if you save over the original image, you won’t need the content you have cropped out.

• Slice (K): Used for creating web images, the slice tool creates rectangular slices from which you can export individual graphics. Build web button interfaces in one canvas and save to sliced areas for your web page.

• Slice Select (K): Select your image slices and adjust the size of the slices by moving the handles. Hold down the Shift key to select multiple slices at once.

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