The Photoshop Toolbox (Continued)

In the lower part of the toolbox we have the Color Well, Edit Mode Buttons, and Screen Mode Buttons.

The Color Well

Moving down in the toolbox, we come to the color well. This is where the foreground and background colors are displayed.

• The foreground color is used when you paint, fill, and stroke selections.
• The background color is used when you make gradient fills, to fill in the erased areas of an image, and when you expand the canvas.
• Foreground and background colors are also used by some special effects filters.

The small double arrow at the top right of the color well 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 colors 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.

Editing Mode Buttons: Selection Mode and Quick Mask Mode

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

Screen Mode Buttons

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.

Tip: If you want to see the image you're working on with no distractions, just do: F, F, Shift-F, Tab and you'll have your image on a plain black background with no other interface elements in the way. To get back to normal, press F, then Tab.

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