Video:Photoshop Tutorial: 10 Useful Tools on the Toolbar

Transcript:Photoshop Tutorial: 10 Useful Tools on the Toolbar

Hi I'm Chris Davis for About.com. Lets review ten of the most useful tools you will come across in Photoshop CS6's toolbar.

General Note About Photoshop Tools

The tool bar is generally located on the left hand side of the screen, although you can move it by clicking and dragging it by the tab at the top. Every tool is important and has a very specific function, however, you will lean on some more than others.

Most Helpful Tools in Photoshop

You will use the move tool constantly. This tool is a multi purpose tool. It will enable you to click and drag several elements, around your work space from layers, text, images, selections and so on.

Selection tools are extremely important. They are available in several different renditions but essentially do the same thing by allowing you to choose part of an image to alter.

The marquee selection tool comes in four styles, rectangle, elliptical, single row, and single column. You can choose a part of the image by dragging out any one of these geometrical shapes.

Other Helpful Tools in Photoshop

The Lasso selection tool has three varieties. Lasso, Polygonal, and magnetic. These selection tools give you more of a free hand capability for your selecting parts of your image.

And the last set of selection tools are the Quick selection and Magic wand. The quick selection tool automatically finds and follows defined edges in the image while the magic wand will select ranges of color.

The crop tool also enables you to select part of your image but for the purpose of resizing your photo. Merely click and drag and area and hit return to perform a crop

Matching colors can be important and is easy to do with the eye dropper tool. It will allow you to select a single pixel of color with in your image.

Other Photoshop Tools

The paint brush has four variations that allow you to paint colors or shapes over your image. You can alter the brush size, color, shape and other options to create that unique look.

The text tool will allow you to add text to your project. It functions much like a word processor controlling font size, color, alignment and so on.

And finally the eraser tool comes in handy to restore an image or even just clean up an edge that doesn't look quite right. You can erase both individual layers or the entire image.

There are several other tools that will also help create that unique look. So don't be afraid to experiment. You can always undo. To learn more check us out on the web at About.com. Thanks for watching.