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Tools and The Options Bar

Lesson 9 from: Photoshop for Beginners: Essential Training

Mark Wallace

Tools and The Options Bar

Lesson 9 from: Photoshop for Beginners: Essential Training

Mark Wallace

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Lesson Info

9. Tools and The Options Bar

We explore the Toolbar and the tools that are most commonly used in Photoshop. We’ll also learn how the Options Bar and the tools work together as a team.

Lessons

Class Trailer
1

Class Introduction

00:52
2

Introducing Photoshop

02:37
3

The Class Materials

01:36
4

How To Open Files

01:42
5

Using The Home Screen

02:35
6

Exploring The Interface

03:30
7

Getting Additional Help

01:36
8

Understanding Workspaces

05:11

Lesson Info

Tools and The Options Bar

let's take a look at the toolbar and the options bar and understand how those two things work together. So on the left hand side of the screen you can see that we have all these different tools here on the left hand side. Now there are six basic categories of tools, loosely speaking. We have tools for selecting things, stuff like this. We've got a little marquee tools so we can select different areas of our image. We have crop and sliced tools so that we can crop out areas of the image that we don't like. We have our retouching tools. So these are things like the healing brush to fix skin blemishes and things like that, the clone tool to go and take something from one part of the image and put it somewhere else. Um, we have our painting tools, those are brushes and paint buckets, stuff like that. We have drawing tools, we've got a little pin tool down here, we've got a text tool so we can add type and things. That's great for thumbnails for Youtube and then we have our navigation tools...

. So like our little hand here to take a look at what's going on here, maybe zoom around and zoom out. So all that navigation stuff. Then we have annotation and measuring tools and so those are tools like this little eyedropper here and some of these things that pop out something that maybe the scientific community would use in addition to some of us photographers as well. So it's not important right now to understand what all of those tools do, but the important thing is to understand that the tools are connected to the options bar at the very top of the screen. I'll click on this little guy right here, you can see that we have this bar right at the top. So let me just zoom in really fast, see this little bar right at the top. It has some options that work with this tool. So let me put this into practical terms. So think about your house and how things work in your house. For example, if you have a washing machine, let's say that washing machine is a tool, the washing machine has options. So maybe you wanted to soak a long time and use cold water and then spend an extra cycle or maybe you want it to be hot water and you want it to turn on at night. It doesn't matter if you have a tool and then you have the options of how that tool behaves the same might be true of your microwave oven. So you want to make some microwave popcorn, you're gonna put the popcorn in the tool and then you're gonna tell the tool to cook on high for three minutes, whatever that is, you have a tool and then you have options for how that tool behaves the same is true in Photoshop. So if we go back over here to Photoshop and we click on a tool, you can see that this little arrow tool up here. If I look at this, you can see that we have how it selects either a layer or a group or the transform controls. All these things are up here. But if I click on this little selection tool, those options change. So the option bar is context sensitive, it changes based on the tool you have selected. So each of these tools have options that tell the tool how to behave. And so as we go forward, we're gonna be using these different tools and I'm gonna show you the different options for how they behave for selecting every touching and different things. So the important key item in this session is we have tools on the left and at the top we have the options bar that tells the tool how to behave and we can look at one of these tools. This is the brush tool. This allows us to brush things on and off. I'll undo that. One of the options is right up here. It's a little target looking thing. I can turn that on and off. That is to let this tool know that I want to use a tablet for the pressure sensitivity and the brush size and using a tablet in Photoshop for retouching is a very good idea

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Workbook
Class Materials

Ratings and Reviews

Katie
 

Mark did a great job at explaining things and going over them multiple times throughout the lessons. My only issue was that sometimes it went a little faster than I could keep up and I needed to rewind it a bit and start again. But from someone who has never worked in photoshop before I 100% recommend this class to anyone trying to learn.

Terri Schwartz
 

Student Work

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