Adobe Photoshop Basics

Let's continue our exploration of the Photoshop workspace. There are four main counterparts to the Photoshop workspace: the menu bar, the status bar, the toolbox, and the palettes. We've already covered the menu bar and the status bar. In this lesson we'll be learning about the toolbox. Since this is a general overview of the toolbox, the materials here are useful for any version of Photoshop.

The Toolbox
You got a jump start on learning about the zoom tool while we were studying the status bar in the last section. Now let's explore more of the Photoshop toolbox. If you have the Quick Reference Card that came with Photoshop, it would be a good idea to locate it now. If you cannot locate a copy, Version 6.0 users can find a PDF file of the Quick Reference card on the main level of your Photoshop installation CD. Version 5.x users can find a diagram of the toolbox and all hidden tools on page 25 of the Photoshop 5.0 User Guide.

When you look at the toolbox, notice how some of the buttons have a tiny arrow in the lower right corner. This arrow indicates that other tools are hidden under that tool. To access the other tools, click and hold down on a button and the other tools will pop out. Try this now by clicking on the rectangle marquee tool and changing to the elliptical marquee tool. The hidden marquee tools are shown here.

Now hold your cursor over one of the buttons and you should see a tooltip appear that tells you the name of the tool and its keyboard shortcut. All the marquee tools have a shortcut of M. An easier way to switch between the different hidden tools is to use the keyboard shortcut along with the Shift key modifier. For the marquee tools, the Shift-M combination toggles between the rectangular and elliptical marquee tools. The single row marquee tools are less often used and must be selected from the toolbox flyout. Another shortcut for cycling through the hidden tools is to Alt/Option click on the toolbox button.

Take a few moments now to familiarize yourself with the tool names using the tooltips. Use the shortcuts you've just learned to explore all the hidden tools. As you select each tool, note the hints provided in the status bar area for each tool. Don't worry about using each tool for now; we'll get to that soon enough. For now, you should just get to know the tool locations and their icons.

Moving down in the toolbox, we come to the color swatches. This is where the foreground and background colors are displayed. The tiny arrow to the top right allows you to swap foreground and background colors. The tiny black and white swatch symbol to the lower left allows you to reset the colors to the default of black foreground and white background. Hold your cursor over those two areas to learn the keyboard shortcuts. To change a color, simply click on either the foreground or background color swatch and select a new color in the color picker. Experiment by changing the foreground and background colors and then resetting them back to defaults.

The next two buttons on the toolbox allow you to toggle between quick mask and selection mode. We'll learn more about this later in future lessons.

Below that you have a set of three buttons that allow you to change the appearance of the workspace. Hold your cursor over each button to see what it does. Notice the keyboard shortcut for all three is F. Hitting F repeatedly toggles between all three modes. Try it now.

This is a convenient place to mention a few more shortcuts for modifying the workspace appearance. Feel free to try them out as you read. When in either of the full screen modes, you can toggle the menu bar on and off with the Shift-F key combination. In any screen mode you can toggle the toolbox, status bar, and palettes on and off with the Tab key. To hide only palettes and leave the toolbox visible, use Shift-Tab.

The last button on the toolbox is for moving your document to ImageReady. We will not be exploring ImageReady in this course.

Before we move on to the palettes, let's review what we learned about the toolbox:

1. An arrow indicates a flyout of hidden tools.
2. Each main tool has a single letter keyboard shortcut assigned to it.
3. The Shift key combined with a tool shortcut allows you to toggle the hidden tools.
4. D = resets the foreground color to black and background color to white.
5. X = swap foreground and background colors.
6. F = toggles screen modes
7. Shift-F = Turns menu bar on and off in full screen modes
8. Tab = toggles the toolbox, status bar, and palettes on and off
9. Shift-Tab = toggle only the palettes on and off

Next > The Palettes